A while back, a former colleague reached out to me to see if I could help an old client with their aging website. Well, I fell in love with their mission and the team as a whole. CACTUS administers the community media component of the Local Journalism Initiative, which places journalists in underserved communities. After a few months of helping them with their website, streamlining their onboarding process, providing a variety of journalistic services and improving documentation, they invited me to join on as their webmaster and portal publisher. I couldn't be happier. I'm still actively working with all my Open Web Group clients but I'm not accepting new clients at the moment.

We build, deliver and maintain low-cost, functional Internet solutions for non-profits, municipalities and inspired entrepreneurs.I created websites for the majority of my career but three years of experiencing the Web from the consumer side was so frustrating. So many important websites weren't living up to their potential. It frustrated me that so many well-meaning organizations were hand-cuffed by tight budgets, time constraints and more pressing matters than putting together all the pieces of a top-notch web presence, so I put together a system that puts organizations in the driver's seat of their websites.Past and present clients include the Canadian Women's Foundation, the Town of Collingwood, Agents of Good, the Association for Fundraising Professionals Golden Horseshoe, Alzheimer's Disease International, the Municipality of Whitestone, Second Harvest, Recycling Council of Ontario, the National Eating Disorder Information Clinic and many other amazing organizations.

"Pay wall". The word came from above that thestar.com was to have a pay wall in place asap. I'm a pretty practical person but one of the reasons I gravitated to the Internet was its ability to freely spread news and information. Between the impending public lock-down, the inside knowledge that the technical resources were lacking to make it happen and an incredibly well timed voluntary separation package, I packed my bags, quit my job, sold my house, left journalism and struck out to really make a difference this time.My plan: Straw-bale home kits. I was leaving journalism for the dream of enabling families to build their own economical, environmentally friendly, sustainable home. There's a bit of a back-story but in a nutshell, I felt that if the "future" of online journalism was for you to be informed as much as you can afford to pay, then I was going to help out in some other way.Needless to say, you probably won't have straw-bale subdivisions bordering your neighbourhood any time soon.

At TEP, I'd been rewarded with a steadily increasing scope of responsibilities for evolving the Toronto Star's website and consistently helping achieve our organizational goals as we moved into new business areas. But my heart was always with thestar.com. I jumped at the chance to be the first "Senior Editor, Internet" for Canada's largest paper. I had three directives. Manage a dedicated team of Web editors and reporters to create unique local content for The Star's website and print editions. Champion Web-awareness to all departments from senior management to front-line staff. And oversee the creation and implementation of technical tools to streamline posting of print and multimedia content while maintaining the highest editorial standards.I took my seat in a newsroom cubicle alongside the rest of the "Web team". I may have been the only management editor to sit on the newsroom floor as opposed to taking up residence in a walled office along the perimetre of the newsroom. For six years I battled to convert every reporter, photographer, librarian, copy editor, editor, senior editor, IT, sales and marketing person into a Web supporter. We went from a newsroom that considered the Web a threat, to publishing reporters' stories on the website before they appeared in print. We installed tv cameras at the news desk and produced live segments with our reporters for local and international broadcasters. We maximized our amazing team of photographers to publish galleries of their work online when only a small selection of photographs could be used in the paper. We wrote breaking news feeds for local broadcasters, linking back to our website. And on any given day, I feel confident saying we dominated real-time coverage of local, provincial and national (Canadian) news on the Web. To sum it up, we built a system and a culture to win on the Web. Then the shit-storm came.

I'll probably never know if my boss saw the union drive coming and rushed to retirement but within 60 days of accepting the vacant General Manager position for TEP, I was part of a three person management negotiating team. On paper, I was responsible for the content, functionality and strategic direction of thestar.com and other electronic initiatives of Torstar. To do that, I built and managed partnerships with other providers to increase content, functionality and revenue for the company (see what I did there? _keywords_ )! But honestly, with a 24x7 opperation to run, 16 staff waiting to be acreditized, a hiring freeze, daily deadlines to publish the news and classifieds... it was a seven month trial by fire. But we pushed through and the team accomplished many great and diverse things going forward. An ad hoc content delivery system to supply Yahoo Canada full Olympic coverage during the 1998 Winter Olympics. A from-scratch feed to give Workopolis.com the bulk of their early online job ads each night. We curated online discussion groups with tens of thousands of registered users. Three-hundred and sixty-four days a year, we published online the bulk of the daily paper - before the print version hit anyone's doorstep. Breaking news throughout the day and night in an era when most news organizations were only posting a sliver of their paper content online after the fact. This is getting long... Quick notes: traveled across North America helping to evaluate potential acquisitions for Torstar's investment portfolio, participated in strategic off-sites, available to staff 24x7 via beeper (remember beepers?). It was intense.

As the willingness to experiment and push boundaries at Southam decreased with ownership changes, I was very lucky to be asked to help launch and evolve thestar.com and other online properties of Torstar. I managed a night-time team of producers and designers to create daily digital versions of Canada's largest newspaper. Our team was also responsible for Torstar's corporate website, Harlequin Romance's book publishing website and various other start-up ventures including TOonline.com and LostConnections.com. It was a whirl-wind time and on any day I could be making story decisions, helping with production, evaluating potential partnerships, weighing in on hiring decisions or streamlining editorial and classified production processes.

"Multimedia story development for concurrent publishing to print, the Internet and databases. Training of reporters in multimedia news gathering, liaison between newsroom and programming staff. Daily webmaster duties and the creation of one of Canada's first Internet based local business directories." There, I think I got all the salient points and keywords in! For me, this job was magical. An incredible group of misfits tucked into the far end of The Hamilton Spectator's newsroom, acting as Southam's digital skunkworks. Trying to change newspapers and keep them relevant and profitable for decades to come. Debating SGML schemas in the morning, coaching reporters in the afternoon, shooting videos of local bands at night and then putting it all on the early Web week after week, refining a template for things to come. So much fun and effort!