About

My life and why it matters to you

The truth is I wanted to be Barbara Streisand. Or an opera singer. But, when I went to college there were hundreds of more talented sopranos than me and I kept getting steered to music education. Really, what would a Diva do teaching kids? 

The bonus at  UW-Madison was the hundreds of undergraduate majors, so I sampled as many as I could as long as my dad was paying. I  majored in English literature (useful–not!), British History (equally useful), French (this ultimately could have been useful), Library Science (what was I thinking?), Political Science (hey, it had “science” in it), and eventually Journalism.

Once I found out I could get paid for writing and quite possibly be on TV, that sealed it. From my first sniff of a waxer to seeing my last byline, I knew this was what I wanted to do. After a stint as the first woman editor of the Badger Herald student newspaper, I landed an internship at WISC-TV where I was eventually hired. I covered the police beat, city and county government, the state capitol, labor relations, agri-business, tourism, features and parades/fests/picnics. And I was in one of the most politically exciting towns in the Midwest.

Eventually I met my future Spousal Unit and decided I would NOT move to Wausau, Wisconsin with him and we settled on Green Bay. A move up: they had a mall AND  professional football team. There, I was the 10 p.m. news producer where I actually had to make the decisions about how much time to give the fatal fire, city council or children’s parade.

All good things end and I left the world of the working journalist to start careers in advertising, PR, marketing and communications.

So why does this all matter to you?

Because if you want to use PR or media as part of your communications strategy, it’s probably a good idea to talk to someone who was actually holding the microphone and asking the questions. It’s also a good idea to talk to someone

More than 25 years in communications means I’ve worked in a variety of industries in everything from trade press relations to breaking news and issue management. Hey, I started shooting film for TV news because it was cool–now it’s digital and it’s still cool! You only have one reputation–trust it to experience.