Old journalists don't fade away, they become bloggers

If you've been following Doonesbury, you know veteran journalist Rick Redfern was laid off from the Washington Post and has taken up blogging.

If you've been following me, you know I "retired" from the Boulder County Business Report a year ago to launch my brilliant new career as a PR professional and entrepreneur.

And if you've been reading this blog, you know what a struggle that entreprenurial part has been. We've been on the phone and occasionally on the road trying to get 3D Radio in front of the right people to put the greatest radio innovation since the transistor (hyperbole alert -- but what to do you expect from a reborn flack?) onto store shelves.

All that to say when the request went out for folks to blog about the Angel Capital Summit, I could not resist. Like the fictional Redfern, once a newshound always a newshound.

So here's the quick and dirty about the event:
Who: Rockies Venture Club and EKS&H, hosts
What: Angel Capital Summit
When: Friday, Nov. 21, 8 a.m. - 6 p.m.
Where: Marriott City Center, 1701 California St., Denver, Colo.
Why: Forty entrepreneurs will present their businesses to hundreds of investors. Not just any entrepreneur is allowed to strut their stuff; they are screened, hand-picked and coached prior to making their pitch.
How much: $159; members of ACS Investor and association partners $129; VIP registration $189; Town Hall only $25.

On tooting your own horn

I finally got around to sending out that darn press release about our new patent. Should be hitting the wire just about the same time as this entry. Whew!

You wouldn’t think it would be so difficult for me to get the word out. After all, until 3D Radio takes off I’m spending most days as a PR flack. Crafting precise messaging, wordsmithing press releases, nudging press contacts — it’s all in a day’s work. For my clients.

What’s holding me back is certainly not writer’s block.

I’ve been writing from Day 1 – bad adolescent poetry followed by bad 20-something poetry until I hit my stride as a 30-plus nontraditional college student with a lot of papers to write. The professors kept on giving me As, and eventually I began to understand my writing wasn’t so bad. In fact it was really good. I was able to publish quite a few papers in academic journals and book chapters.

Some time during grad school I realized writing was my calling, and everything I’ve done since then has involved plenty of prose, from freelance reporting to teaching to high-tech consulting to my last full-time gig as a newspaper editor.

But I’ve always written about something else — some people’s belief, someone’s job, a company’s product, a new business – never about myself. I even directed my column outward to speak about someone I admired, a book I just read, or something important I learned from a parent. I purposefully put myself in the background because, well, I just didn’t think readers would find me as interesting as the subjects I wrote about.

So now I’m faced with promoting my own company and finding the sharp PR showmanship that comes so naturally when thinking of a client’s story grows a bit blurry. It’s hard to brag about your own creation. It’s a little bit of shyness, a touch of fear (what if they don’t like it/me?), and quite a bit of “Oh my God, one more thing on my bottomless to-do list.”