I’m a journalist based in New York City. I am currently the managing editor of techPresident, a news site covering technology in politics, government, and civic life.
My work has appeared on Yahoo News, in the pages of the Newark Star-Ledger, City Limits, and elsewhere. Prior to joining techPresident, I covered local politics in New Jersey and New York City.
Outside of writing and editing, I have managed campaign and media relationships on a nationwide citizen engagement project around the 2010 midterm elections, worked for a nonpartisan public policy think tank, played rugby, studied kung fu, worked in tech support and, yes, decided to move to New York from sunny Sonoma County, California. It was an easier decision than you’d think. On the side, I improve my programming skills and work to master the art of the grill.
I graduated magna cum laude from New York University with a B.A. in journalism and metropolitan studies, and now reside in the beautiful Gowanus section of Brooklyn.
Some recent favorites from my clips file:
Yahoo News, April 6, 2012: “Meet the newest tech start-up: the Obama campaign”
techPresident, Feb. 12, 2012: “Teddy Goff and Joe Rospars On How Obama’s Campaign Is Trying to Get Back to the ‘We’”
techPresident, Jan. 27, 2012: “Why Nobody’s Mad at Twitter’s International Censorship Move”
techPresident, Feb. 3, 2012: “With Pinterest and Twitter, Activists are Out to Punish Komen”
techPresident, Sept. 15, 2011: “Gig.U Asks Universities and Telcos to Work Together for the Internet of the Future“
This story, the second in a series about how the Internet was changing local politics and activism in New York and in the world circa Barack Obama’s 2008 election to the presidency, led directly to my joining techPresident. It was the first time I spoke to NGP Software’s Stu Trevelyan for a story, but wouldn’t be the last. Here’s Ari Hoffnung, then at a still-solvent Bear Stearns and taking his second tilt at a City Council seat:
“Ari Hoffnung can use the same software that Barack Obama can,” Mr. Hoffnung said, marveling. “How cool is that?”
In this 2009 story for The Riverdale Press, I trace the brief resurgence of New York’s Democratic Party in the State Senate — and the resulting influence for the neighborhood I covered, represented by three different state senators — in part to the hot-blooded revenge of Guy Velella, a Republican state lawmaker who by that time had already left politics in disgrace and finished serving time on bribery charges.
When FBI and law enforcement officials arrested four hapless, apparently would-be terrorists as they tried to plant bombs in front of a Bronx synagogue one May morning in 2009, I had just packed up after covering a meeting about a twenty-minute drive away.
I was the staff politics writer for The Riverdale Press, a scrappy weekly newspaper in the Bronx known as the only New York City weekly to hold a Pulitzer Prize. When my photo editor called in the tip, I threw my stuff in the back of the aging Peugeot 405 my publisher lent out to cover assignments and struggled to work its stick shift with one hand and my cellphone with the other in a mad dash back to Riverdale from the North Bronx.
The Press would go on to win first place the Suburban Newspaper Association’s breaking news category for our team coverage of that bombing. I covered the news on our blog and in news alerts to subscribers the night of the attack and after an early morning press conference the next day. I also contributed stories from federal court in Newburgh, N.Y. The four men would go on to be convicted, well after I left The Press in 2009.
Click through for a selection of clips from this coverage.
Here’s me from 2007, writing in Hudson County’s own Jersey Journal:
A kamikaze squirrel fell from the sky and detonated a Bayonne woman’s car Wednesday, police said yesterday.
Lindsey Millar, 23, and her brother, Tony, 22, were both home Wednesday at about 12:45 p.m. when they suddenly noticed Lindsey’s car burning outside their 42nd Street home.
Tony Millar said yesterday that firefighters told them it was the work of a buck-toothed saboteur that had been gnawing on power lines connected to a transformer above the 2006 Toyota Camry.
“The squirrel chewed through the wire, was set on fire, fell down directly to where the car was,” Tony Millar said. “The squirrel, on fire, slid into the engine compartment and blew up the car …”
Oddly, the item I wrote appeared day-of on the NJ.com blog under my editor’s byline, but I get appropriate credits in this related post.