andrew myers
About me
Welcome to my cyber space. Feel free to browse around. You'll find lots of photos, a few portfolio examples and other odds and ends about family and friends. Pay no attention to links that say click here.
The writer…
I am an experienced editor, writer, Web designer and team leader who has managed and edited publications in print and electronic media. Most of my career has been in daily newspapers, corporate publications and public relations. The writing gig started for me at the Daily Tar Heel 
at UNC in Chapel Hill. What a time that was. Civil rights marches. Publish or perish crises. And a winning basketball team!
I hit the ground running for the old Newark Evening News, one of the great former dailies in the northeast: honest, well-written and almost never seen lying on the front seat of a cab. She died after a noble but ill-conceived guild strike. Managers regularly winked at padded expense accounts, but our demand for higher base pay proved fatal.
I then spent five years at the Asbury Park Press , where I covered the gamut from zoning disputes to serial murder trials, wheedling evidence from county detectives for the next day's hot story. One day I stumbled over the sight of my own byline staring up at me from a soggy copy of yesterday's paper under a bush. It was time to move on. I joined AT&T's Bell Laboratories in 1977 as a writer for the Bell Labs News.
This marked the beginning of a 20-year career at AT&T , where I wrote and edited various publications, press releases, speeches and the like as a member of AT&T's PR organization. Those days bring back many fond memories and I sorely miss many of my colleagues and mentors. Ma Bell was an amazing, innovative and yet curiously naíve company. Its leaders preached a lofty mission and stuck with it to the end. They never did learn how to play dirty like some of the upstart telecom competitors. In the end she was finally crushed and dismembered.
The hyperlinks…
I can even recall the date because I kept the article: December 8, 1993. A story in The New York Times had caught my eye, something about a new software application called Mosaic. Here was a tool for the masses that could theoretically connect any piece of information to another anywhere in the world. Hyperlinks. What a concept! Very interesting, I thought. Of course, at Bell Labs, we knew about Arpanet and something emerging that people began to call "The Internet" or "The World Wide Web." The Mosaic story brought things into focus for me. I sensed, somehow, that this could become – for average people – a tool that leveraged information itself: something that could lead to unimaginable changes in business, the economy, culture, arts and society. It was more than a big idea. It symbolized everything implied by the "Information Age." Something that could change all the rules. Yes, I got all tingly. Of course, some of my PR colleagues smiled at my enthusiasm. They nodded politely while I regaled them with the possibilities. One department head observed it was even laughable to imagine that people would use, much less remember, those silly "http" things.
The info age…
So I got involved by joining, and eventually leading a team that launched AT&T's first public website, www.att.com. Those were heady days. We bushwacked our way into a wild and uncharted jungle. Even today, whenever I publish a new web page, somewhere deep inside I still feel the faint echo of a cub reporter's adrenalin rush at seeing his byline on the front page of the Daily Tar Heel. Above the fold, of course. :-)