About
self-portrait, jan. 2010
Writers are readers first. I’m fortunate, in that my mother read to me regularly. She also enrolled me in the Dr. Seuss book club and encouraged me to use my imagination from an early age. Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little by E.B. White, The Velveteen Rabbit by Margerie Williams, The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein and The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis were the epics of my youth.
In the nature vs. nurture department, I have my paternal grandmother Dorothy Steele Burn, to thank for my writer’s gene. The presence of this gene was first recognized in fifth grade, thanks to the expert teaching of Mr. McKay at Washington Elementary in Wheaton. Later, at Chestnut Hill Academy in Philadelphia, I had the good fortune to work with Dr. Fles and his favorite tome, The Norton Anthology. At Franklin & Marshall, Joe Voelker, Jody Gladding, and Ira Grushow saw something in me. Sometimes it was potential, other times it was adolescent pretense.
The College Reporter at F&M gave me my first taste of what it felt like to be recognized for my work. And recognized I was, by several members of the administration in fact, all who felt the newspaper was dangerously off message. I was also routinely recognized by angry frat boys who banned me from their parties, because I “lacked discretion” when reporting on their sordid behavior. I truly came to understand the power of journalism (and thus the responsibility it demands), when a grown man I was interviewing broke down and begged me not to write about him, or about the incident that led to his being fired from the college. Coming out of school in 1987, I opted to put the reporter’s notebook down. In its place, I picked up the rhetoric of the environmental movement and applied it in clever ways to secure funding for the cause.
While working on Capitol Hill in 1989, Dupree’s Diamond News published my poem, “Musings on George Bush’s Inaguration” next to a memorial piece on Abbey Hoffman. I released a self-published chapbook of poems, information age blues in 1992, and then re-relased a second edition in 1993. In 1994, Salt Lake City’s alternative press, Private Eye Weekly ran my poem, “space” on their back page. The publisher compensated me with a free dinner for two at a local restaurant. I began to understand this is how poetry pays. In 1998, online literary magazine, Morpo Review, gambled and decided to run “Game Day” in their December issue, giving me my first short story credit.
In 1995 I turned to advertising, and ad agencies in particular, for work. My ad career has spanned seven agencies in five states, plus I’ve done freelance work for a number of others. Thus far, I’ve helped shape messages for many of the nation’s leading consumer brands–Columbia Sportswear, Camel, Baileys, Captain Morgan, United Airlines, Coors, HP, McDonald’s, NAPA Auto Parts, American Tourister and Samsonite to name a few.
Driven to take part in the DIY publishing revolution, I started building Web sites by hand in 1999. In 2002, I launched and managed the first agency-owned Internet radio station, KTIG, for The Integer Group in Denver. In that same year, I helped launch an internal Wiki for Integer staff on the Coors business. After a pivotal trip to Austin and SXSW in 2003, I launched my first blog. A year later, I launched my first popular blog, which is now a leading trade rag for the media, marketing and ad industries.
During the spring of 2006, I was called upon to put a team together and create an online music magazine for a major lifestyle brand. Doing so (while Content Director at BFG Communications in Hilton Head) brought all my worlds together–creative writing, advertising, the Web and live music–in an unprecedented way. All told, my team and I created hundreds of original articles, photo galleries (note: 24 meg download), podcasts and video exclusives, all of which ran on Camel.com.
Today, I’m back in Portland after a coast-to-coast 13-year boomerang. I’m working to build my own marketing services practice and media business. It sounds like two different objectives, but it’s really one. Media is a marketing service now, thanks to the Internet.
So, while I build out my own media properties, I’m also offering to do the same for clients via an agency relationship. AdPulp is the leading media brand in the group right now. AdPulp is proof of concept for my clients. If you want to pull in an audience, whatever the audience and whatever the reason, you need media. You may need ads too, but online, it’s content first.
