Medium to long term employment in editorial management.
I am interested in:
My ethos: By gleaning from the best of tradition and technology, we can build new media as lucid and elegant as Philippe Starck's Ghost Chair.
November 2006-December 2007
As part of the startup team I collaborated with the lead developer to build a complex portal and social network in support of a PBS TV show. Working on contract, I oversaw editorial planning, workflow and staffing, and was lead contact for the graphic design firm that designed the site.
April 2006-December 2006
This is a company that makes innovative wafer test equipment and has an aggressive IP strategy. I spent a year here writing provisional patent applications and designed a patent database to help them track their own and their competitors' filings with the US Patent & Trademark Office.
October 2005-March 2006
I was employee number six at this angel-funded blog network. As News Editor, I helped craft a content strategy and oversaw the launch of the homepage. I also drafted the company's editorial policies and internal business plan.
January 2005-April 2005
A direct-mail magazine with a circulation of 22,000 affluent households in Pasadena, Arroyo Monthly was an innovative idea: the first ever “philanthropic lifestyle” magazine. This was an intense, four-month effort to develop the content strategy in collaboration with the publisher and art director and develop a freelance budget and freelance staff.
2003-2005
I oversaw a staff of full-time writers, and a large roster of freelancers at this alternative weekly newspaper on California's Central Coast.
Under my editorship the paper grew its ad page count by 50%, and we swept up numerous awards from the Association of Alternative Newspapers and the California Newspaper Publishers' Association.
We were the only newspaper in the State of California to endorse Schwarzenegger in the recall election, based on the results of The Great Gubernatorial Quiz, a feature that took third place at the AAN awards in the wildcard category that year.
1995-Present
I've written for Inc. Magazine on management, business blogs and how to run a company like a girl. My favorite is an essay about my father and his exploits as a serial entrepreneur, called If At First You Don't Succeed.
As a Contributing Editor at Worth Magazine and its spin-off, Equity, I profiled business innovators, including Meg Whitman, Scott Cook, Tim Draper and John McAfee, and wrote essays with titles like "Diary of a Fritterer," and was once even paid a significant amount of money to pen the biography of my second-hand Chanel Suit.
For about a year after its launch in 2001, I wrote the Eye For Industry column for US Business Review, a spin-off of the award-winning British business magazine, Venture.
1992-1998
I wrote numerous features, chronicled my son's early life in the "Oh, Baby!" parenting column, and later wrote a column on "LA Culture" that turned into a book, Super Vixens' Dymaxion Lounge, when Buzz entered into a publishing deal with St. Martin's Press in 1997. Buzz folded shortly thereafter. I think everybody who was involved in Buzz still misses the magazine. It was a bit charmed.
1999-present
I've written many book reviews, a few articles, and short stories for the Weekly.
1993-2005
Here is a list of all 124 articles I’ve written for the LA Times over the years. I started out as a freelance society and nightlife columnist for the “Social Climes” section in 1993, and later began a long-running beauty column in the LA Times Sunday Magazine.
Here is my Myers-Briggs personality profile (I'm an "idealist"), which is extraordinarily accurate and reads, in part:
Idealists enjoy discussions about a wide range of topics, particularly those that deal with the future. They are typically easy-going and flexible, but if their values are challenged they may refuse to compromise.
Fair enough. For a window into how I run a creative team, you can read an essay I wrote on my management style for Inc. Magazine.
I am a high school drop-out, though I went to lots of colleges and earned a degree in English and Psychology from Antioch University in San Francisco in 1984. I've taught creative writing and basic sailing at UCLA. I've also spent significant amounts of time in various parts of the world, including a couple of years in India--not as any kind of spiritual pilgrim but among Indian entrepreneurs, back before an open economy encouraged such things. Now I live in beautiful Foster City, CA.
Hillary Johnson: MTV's The Real Real World
New York Times Bestseller
The Calico Shaman
I've met two real shamans in my life, and my friend Carla is one of them. We had fun turning her work into fairytale-like stories.
