Steven
Location: New Jersey
Job quest: Corporate Communications
Sometimes he thinks it’s just a bad David Letterman routine and waits for
the silly dream sequence to end. After all, Steven started college those many years
ago studying fine arts and photography. The Florida gallery that handled his
photography also exhibited works from some of the finest avant-garde artists
in the world.
However did he end up as an editor and technology guru at
newspapers across the Gulf Coast before being recruited by the august New York
Times – and then becoming a sought-after publishing-systems consultant and
writer, only to have it blow up in his face? Was it the stories he wrote about
the Internet bubble? Was it the work done to help newspapers move to embrace
the online world? Or was it just that the CEO at his last real job was
spending more company money on his girlfriend than Steven could save with his
productivity projects?
Whatever it was, Steven’s dual careers as a journalist and consultant went down the tubes with the
recession of 2001. Any hopes he had of getting back in the groove were quashed after that fateful day September 2001 as client after client called to cancel projects.
Until the bubble burst, Steven worked as an editor, reporter and technology consultant. He translated geek-speak into English, helping politicians and businesspeople understand what technology could do to help them, explained why technology companies and programmers should care about what happened in politics and business, and occasionally fixed computers and taught people how to use them.
It was a convoluted path, moving from fine art to newspaper production
to management and consulting, a trek that began when Steven started working on the student newspaper at the University of South Florida in Tampa to defray his tuition.
One evening back in there somewhere, Steven helped one of his professors uncrate and deploy some typewriter-like tape-punching machines and photo typesetters from Compugraphic, beginning an informal study into the ins and outs of typography,
publishing and workflow. He was an apprentice printer by night, photographer by day, and a student whenever he could find the time and money.
Steven landed a job as a staff photographer at The Tampa Tribune,
taking off three years
later to become a freelancer with a handful of contracts ranging from ABC Records to an automobile battery manufacturer.
Several years later, the offer of a steady paycheck,
sweetened by the sun and sand of Sarasota, sidetracked the freelance career and
put all that expensive college training into use while he worked as a copy
editor, layout editor and news editor at the local paper.
Steven landed at the newspaper in New Orleans in 1980, eventually becoming the Sunday news editor and – we’re still not quite sure how – the resident newsroom geek, spearheading the newsroom’s pagination project, integrating a Macintosh network and picture desk while still managing to produce a 330,000 circulation Sunday paper.
Steven joined The New York Times in 1992 as an editor in the Newsroom Technology Office. He was essentially an on-staff consultant for technology issues, whether related to coverage of them or their use in the paper’s production.
Steven tracked cyberspace issues, technology productivity tools, periodically wrote a column on business-related web sites, converted the newsroom to multimedia computers
(allowing every reporter and editor in the building access to a wide range of computer-assisted-reporting tools) and arranged to electronically receive all decisions from the U.S. Supreme Court, reformat them to fit newspaper wire transmission standards and redistribute them to The New York Times on the Web and clients of The New York Times News Service.
In late 1997, he left The Times to return to consulting and freelance writing.
Oddly enough, leaving The Times gave him more time to write for The Times, something that lasted until well after the Internet bubble popped. He has written for The Times, Money magazine's web site, Family Money, ABCNews.com and a number of niche publications. Periodically he did what his kids call "real work," a function that required commuting to Dallas to run the IT department of Belo Interactive, an Internet startup carved out of the Belo Corporation, and to Long Island as deputy editor of Interactive Week, one of the Ziff-Davis Media family of late, lamented computer publications.
When the Internet economy went down the tubes, it took the advertising business with it, sounding the death knell for freelance writers and publishing systems consultants. Steven pays the bills by teaching people to use computers, installing home and small-office networks and translating geek into plain English for all those folks whose computers get in the way of their real lives.
These days, Steven is back in college taking a series of management and accounting classes and preparing to go to graduate school. The plan is to do a little teaching,
a little writing, a little consulting and see what comes up on the next turn of the wheel.
Steven's Tales
