My Journey Through Entrepreneurship and Content Creation

---

I’ve known since grade school that I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. From winning literary contests in fourth and fifth grades, to the sixth-grade assignment where we wrote and created our own book (I still have mine, and yes it’s corny), to making it to the district spelling bee in eighth grade (I still have that trophy, too!) – I’ve always had an affinity for the written word.

In high school, as I devoured Stephen King books in my free time, I imagined I’d write the next Great American Novel.

By college, I realized that might not be the most secure source of income. So I went into journalism instead. (They say every journalist has a draft of a novel in their desk drawer.) After two years in undergrad, I had to leave due to a family tragedy. But I would be back.

In the interim, I moved across the country, got married, had a baby, and got divorced. (Side note, in that sentence, I debated whether to include the Oxford comma. Associated Press style says no in most instances; but I’m kind of partial to the darn thing, so I left it.)

When my baby was 2, I bought the cloth diaper service we had been using since they were born. Suddenly, at 25, I was an entrepreneur, with employees and everything! That’s when I began to teach myself about marketing, entirely on the job, through trial and error. I joined networking organizations, assuming leadership roles in some of them. I made good friends there. I placed display ads with coupons in local publications, always tinkering to see which work best. I got business card magnets included in the bags of goodies that were sent home from the hospital with new moms. I produced and ran a TV commercial on several cable channels and once during an NCAA football game. The internet was still burgeoning at that time; I launched the company website. Social media wouldn’t come along for several more years.

After four years, I sold the business. I handled that on my own as well. My kiddo was getting older and we needed a more stable evening routine than I could offer running something as labor intensive as a diaper service. Ultimately, it freed me up to return to school and finish that journalism degree.

This was back when Tucson had two daily newspapers. My first internship was at the now-defunct afternoon paper, the Tucson Citizen. I put to use my skills at researching and interviewing, as well as writing, and I got several stories published, including one on the paper’s front page, which was a big deal for a summer intern.

The following summer, right after graduation, I went east to work in the global pagination division of the Wall Street Journal, working on the Europe and Asia editions (so my work hours were still in the daytime in our time zone). The internship began with a two-week copy editing “boot camp” at Temple University. We were drilled on spelling, country locations and capitals, major bodies of water, and AP Style. Many in my cohort went on to copy-editing internships at different newspapers scattered around the northeastern U.S. Mine had some copy editing, but mostly it was layout. I learned how to work cross-functionally with global teams to put out the paper each day. I learned how to adhere to the Wall Street Journal’s layout guidelines and editing style.

Then when I returned home to Tucson, I landed a job as a reporter at what was, at the time, the biggest game in town: the Arizona Daily Star. Eventually, a certain amount of copy editing was also added to my plate. The internet was well-established by then, but social media was just beginning to take hold. I learned how to use the Star’s content management system to post my stories online. For a while, I contributed to a blog dedicated to the paper’s business reporting. (In all of the website incarnations in the intervening years, the blog has long since disappeared.) I was the consumer reporter and focused my posts that way, covering everything from the Better Business Bureau to the cost of groceries. I became familiar with the two main social media of the time – Twitter (now X), where I promoted links to my and my colleagues’ stories, and Facebook, which I learned to use for research and to create contacts. I became the “alternative presentation” queen of the newsroom, as I submitted pieces that weren’t always written in a narrative format, but sometimes as graphics or lists or charts. I won several awards while I worked there, but ultimately after several years I was laid off in what was then the company’s largest reduction in force ever. We know what has continued to happen to newspapers since then.

That opened the door for me to expand my skillset even more. I quickly landed a position in the University of Arizona’s public relations office, where I was in charge of employee communications. This meant writing for, compiling and publishing the weekly “Lo Que Pasa” employee email and keeping the corresponding website, UA@Work (now part of the University’s main news website), up to date with all the stories linked from the e-newsletter. I was still able to wear my reporter and copy editor hat even as I embraced content management and creation. I learned an entirely new content management system as well as the University’s proprietary system for sending out e-blasts.

I have been through a handful of jobs since then, always staying around two years before (usually) having my position eliminated. I’ve worked as a grant-writer, a resume editor, a web producer and assignment editor for TV news, a content specialist for an advertising agency, and a communications and outreach coordinator most recently. Every experience made use of my little bachelor's degree in journalism, and I was always thrilled to find places where the written word was still valued. And each stop entailed more and more marketing responsibility. So after my most recent position was eliminated and I unsuccessfully applied for several jobs, I decided to go back to school and finally get the master’s degree I’d been wanting in marketing but never seemed to have the time to pursue.

So here I am, on a new journey. Expanding my skills once more, learning actual best practices for marketing instead of just throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks.

I invite you to come along with me as I simultaneously share and show off what I’m learning. Hopefully, we’ll all be better off for it!