Greatest Hits


Drill, Baby, Drill!

The Portfolio.com blog post that created a catch-phrase for Republicans during the 2008 presidential election.


On the Record

When Mark Foley got busted for having inappropriate texting sessions with teenage pages, I wasn't too surprised. I wrote about Foley's sexual orientation a decade before in a story for The Advocate.


The Story ABCNews.com Doesn't Want You to See

I was asked to reflect on my Foley story for ABCNews.com. But after three days, editors yanked my piece from the site and offered no good explanation for the spike. Read it for yourself.


The Musical Men

I met producer Craig Zadan in 1998 and have watched his career with admiration. He and his partner Neil Meron brought back the movie musical as a viable form of commercial entertainment. I profiled them for Portfolio.com when their adaptation of Hairspray was released.


Oil for Food: The Investigation

At FOXNews.com, I was the lead online editor for the new channel's probe of the United Nations Oil-for-Food Program. I edited stories for the Web, kept up our archive of material, and occasionally wrote. This is an example of such a story.

Deputy Editor, 2007-2009

After a sabbatical to spend time with my dad and care for him before he died, I returned to New York and landed at Portfolio.com. The business news and analysis site had been live for a week when I started as its homepage editor. Eighteen months later, the site and the magazine got downsized significantly. The hope was a leaner operation would keep the brand alive. But six months later, Portfolio fell victim to the recession and the media industry's woes.

I survived the first whack and ended up as one of three survivors on the website staff. As deputy editor, I still did my original job as homepage editor and took on duties of overseeing our business travel section, edited our political columnist, wrote the occasional story, and wrote a daily blog post on President Obama's 100 days (I got up to day 98 when Portfolio shut down). I also started a blog on business travel, but this lasted a whole 12 days before the end came.

My biggest contribution in two years? I believe I'm responsible for the Republicans' "Drill, Baby, Drill" mantra this year. On the day Sarah Palin got tapped to be John McCain's running mate, I wrote an entry for Matt Cooper's Capital blog about how Palin's selection might lead to a great debate on energy policy. The last thing I did was write the headline--Drill, Baby, Drill--stopping before I published because I wondered if I was being sexist. A week later, Rudy Giuliani used the line during his speech at the Republican National Convention. Now, it's the one of the catch phrases of the 2008 election.


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Managing Editor, 2003-2005

At FOXNews.com, I ran the day-to-day news operation as managing editor for two years. Once in a while, I had to write a story – mostly because I didn’t have a reporter to assign to do the job.

Some of the gems.
U.N. Corruption – FOX News investigated the United Nations with a fierce determination, pushing the Oil-for-Food story into the light. I made sure the site played a strong role in the telling of the story and was the lead Web editor on the project. Click here for a tangent to the tale.

Trail Tales – During the 2004 presidential campaign, I started a daily column (not a blog per se) with tidbits from the campaign trail. I used contributions from whoever in the FOX universe would given them. One example is here.

Bush v. Kerry – Two stories I wrote in a pinch. The first, an analysis of one of the presidential debates. The second, the flap over an anti-Kerry documentary.
I reported. You decide.
 

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Senior Editor & News Manager, 1999-2003

One of the problems with news Web sites is that archives sometimes disappear.
This is especially the case in the television news business, which in the past never had to worry about keeping a print library of its reporting. As news sites got redesigned, sometimes an entire library of material was lost.

I did a search on ABCNews.com under my byline. Nothing. I worked there for a year as a producer and more than three years as an editor, yet nada. I found one story I wrote recently that ABC specifically killed, however, and another story from 1999.
The Foley Folly – More than two years after I left ABCNews.com, I got a call to contribute a reporter’s notebook about a story I’d written 10 years previously that reported on Mark Foley’s sexual orientation.
I turned the story around, it got a weekend run, and then it got yanked from the site. I never got a good answer why and even with a little bit of coverage by the blogs, ABC’s spike got buried deep.

800 or 911? – One of the nation’s biggest HMOs tries to convince more people stay away from calling 911.

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