About Me

I cooked up the idea for a weekly newspaper in California's Silicon Valley called Metro in the 1980s and, in a subsequent fit of madness (1993) pressed the button to detonate an excursion into cyberspace. That was an dialup online service called LiveW!re. The next year a government-sponsored computer network called the Internet started moving up the rock & roll charts, and it's been a wild ride ever since.

I'm the chief exec of the companies that publish Metro and its affiliated papers, Metro Santa Cruz, Northern California Bohemian. During the 1990s, I also headed up a community newspaper group that included weekly newspapers in Los Gatos, Saratoga, Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Campbell and Willow Glen. Known as Silicon Valley Community Newspapers, that division was sold off by Metro in 2001 to allow the company to concentrate on its core products, alternative newspapers, and the company's Internet activities. That was harder to do when Metro Publishing was a 200-person company publishing 11 newspapers out of nine offices and producing 500 pages a week that reached eight Bay Area counties.

Our online ventures to date include Virtual Valley, Metroactive and Boulevards, which is developing a global network of community sites, including losangeles.com, sanfrancisco.com and a bunch of others further afield, such as lahabana.com.

If you want to read my formal bio with community activities and all that, it's here.

I enjoy writing and photography when I can find the time. If you want to read some articles I've written or see some photos I've taken, you'll find them on this site.