Award-winning journalist joins Olney Enterprise
Q: Where are you from?
A: I was born in a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, the oldest of my parents’ four children. For most of my childhood, we lived next to the hospital where I was born so that my dad, an obstetrician, didn’t have to drive far to deliver babies. He stopped counting years ago – at 10,000 babies. I also spent a lot of time in a small town south of the city called Festus, where my mom’s large German-Jewish family farmed and ran a scrap iron recycling business. I graduated from a Catholic girls’ high school and attended Vanderbilt University’s School of Engineering, where I studied molecular biology.
Q: How and when did you get into journalism?
A: After my second year at Vanderbilt, I took a summer class in news writing at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, where I was waiting tables to earn money for school and where my mom and stepfather lived. I also got an internship at the NBC affiliate, KRIS-TV, and learned to write scripts and put the 5 p.m. news program together. One day, the news director called me at home as I was about to walk out the door for my waitress shift, and he told me the 5 p.m. news producer – my boss - hadn’t shown up for work, and he needed help writing the show. Sadly, my boss never returned, and I was hired to do his job. I was 20 years old and didn’t know what I didn’t know, but I was in love with journalism. I worked at KRIS as a producer and reporter for two years, then finished my degree at the University of Texas at Austin. During my college years, I did internships with author James (Bush’s Brain, The Architect) Moore, then a KHOU correspondent, and at Forbes magazine in New York, working on the List of Richest Americans.
Q: What other journalism work have you done?
A: I worked in Austin for The Associated Press and United Press International as a capitol correspondent for 11 years and freelanced for the Austin American-States man, Texas Monthly and Southern Living magazines. During those years, I met many famous people and people who would go on to be famous. One of my favorite memories was attending a banquet thrown by Gov. Ann Richards and Lady Bird Johnson to honor Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Phillip.
I moved to Los Angeles in 1996 and got a job at United Press International’s Los Angeles bureau. I covered a lot of stories about celebrities, including Phil Spector’s murder trial, Robert Downey Jr.’s many brushes with the law, and other weird criminal trials and entertainment industry stories. I won some investigative awards for stories I wrote for a law journal and began working for Reuters, the world’s largest news agency, in 2002.
At Reuters, I was assigned to cover entertainment industry financial news - and my beat included The Walt Disney Co., Pixar, DreamWorks Animation, Regal Cinemas, Blockbuster and a then-tiny streaming company called Netflix. In 2010, I left Reuters to write a book about the origins of Netflix, which was published two years later by Penguin’s Portfolio imprint. In 2019, director Shawn Cauthen and I made a documentary, Netflix vs. the World, based on my book. It won Best Documentary at the Lone Star Film Festival, and you can now see it on Amazon Prime, Hulu and other streaming services. I also started writing podcasts, including the first Business Wars series for Wondery, called “Netflix vs. Blockbuster vs. HBO,” and a series called “Raven 23: Presumption of Guilt,” that my business partner, Micheal Flaherty, and I designed to bring attention to the wrongful conviction of Olney resident Dustin Heard and his Blackwater Worldwide comrades.
Q: What brought you to Olney, Texas?
A: In a word – love. In 2012, I wrote my Netflix book at an office building in Corpus Christi, where David Keathley of Olney also worked. We got to talking over many weeks, and he invited me to his home for dinner, where I met his boyhood friend, Joe Bob Cumpton. It was love at first sight, and we’ve been following each other around ever since. He taught me how to two-step and to howl at the moon when I’m taking myself too seriously. He moved with me to Austin and St. Louis for graduate school, and I’d sneak into his man camp outside Midland when he worked in the Permian Basin.
I first visited Olney with Joe at Christmas of 2012. Over the years, I made so many friends here, including his parents, Ann and Gerald Cumpton that I decided to make Olney my home when I finished my master’s degree in 2019. I’m loving writing for The Enterprise and can’t wait to see how the town will evolve and what stories we’ll share in the years to come.