Your fortune for today,

Welcome…
Hi there. Thanks for visiting my cyber space. Here are some recent website projects. Feel free to browse. You'll find a few portfolio examples plus odds and ends about family and friends. Pay no attention to links that say click here.

The writer…
I am an experienced editor, writer, Web designer and team leader who has managed and edited publications in print and electronic media. Most of my career has been in daily newspapers, corporate publications and public relations. The writing gig started for me at the Daily Tar Heel at UNC in Chapel Hill. What a time that was. Civil rights marches. Publish or peril crises. And a winning basketball team! I hit the ground running for the Newark Evening News, one of the great former dailies in the northeast: noble, honest, well-written and almost never seen lying on the front seat of a cab. She died after a noble but ill-conceived guild strike. They were already winking at the padded expense accounts but we demanded a higher base. After five years at the Asbury Park Press, I'd digested a giant dose of murder trials, chasing county detectives and stumbling over my own byline staring up at me from a soggy copy of yesterday's paper under a bush. In 1977 I joined AT&T as a writer for the Bell Labs News. Over a span of 20 years, I wrote, edited and managed in press relations, employee communications executive speech writing and various other projects in public relations. I look back fondly on my AT&T years and sorely miss many colleagues and mentors there. Ma Bell was an amazing, innovative and yet curiously naíve company whose leaders thought the world would understand its lofty mission. She was treated unfairly — AT&T didn't know how to play dirty — and, in the end, finally crushed and dismembered by outside forces.

The hyperlinks…
I can even recall the date because I kept the article: December 8, 1993. A The New York Times story had caught my eye. John Markoff had a piece on some new software called Mosaic. Here was a tool that could theoretically connect any piece of information to another anywhere in the world. Hyperlinks. Hmm… Very interesting. Of course, at Bell Labs, we had already heard a lot about Arpanet and this emerging thing called the "Internet." But seeing the Mosaic story seemed to turn on a bright light. Mosaic suddenly brought it all together. Nobody used the word browser back then. But whatever it was, I knew instantly that Mosaic could — for average people — become the simple interface that made possible unimaginable things in society, culture, business and the economy. It was more than a so-called "big idea." It changed all the rules. Okay, I admit it. I got all tingly. More than a few PR colleagues smiled and nodded politely at my WWW enthusiasm. To some, it was laughable to think that people would use, much less remember, those silly URL-thingies.

The info age…
I decided to get involved in emerging hypermedia by joining, and eventually leading the team that launched AT&T's first public website, www.att.com. In those heady days we were thrilled to be bushwacking blindly into an uncharted jungle. And today, each time I publish a new web page, I feel a faint echo of the cub reporter's adrenalin rush at seeing my first byline on the front page of the Daily Tar Heel. Above the fold, of course. :-)

See the Vital Stats page, the Portfolio page or the Websites for Artists page for my résumé and current projects.