Dylan Tweney

Following my stint at VentureBeat, I moved to the business side, first providing content strategy to startups and executives, then running comms and content in-house for a few years. I’ve written speeches, drafted and published bylines, produced podcasts, created and managed editorial calendars, run blogs, overseen more website redesigns than I care to remember, and have written too many blog posts to count.

As Highwire’s in-house editor, I work across the full range of our practice areas. My focus is on creating great content for clients in whatever format best suits each one. What’s great content? It’s editorial (written, audio, video, or interactive) that fits into a coherent, ambitious strategy that engages customers and demonstrates leadership — and which integrates into and supports PR and marketing goals.

This is going to sound weird for someone in this line of work, but the poet Louise Glück. I took two poetry workshops from her in college, which profoundly changed the way I approach writing and also how I read. As a poet, I have achieved no distinction whatsoever. But Louise’s classes made me into an editor and gave me a career.

My two kids, my wife, books, haiku, swimming, cooking, meditation, discovering new kinds of tea, baking, learning to cook things, poetry. Also, breathing.

When I was at WIRED, I wrote a feature on a clock that Jeff Bezos commissioned which is being built inside a mountain in Texas and is designed to run for 10,000 years. That clock is meant to change the way people think about time. I like to think that my story is a key part of delivering that message.

But the project that brought me the most satisfaction was a pro bono job for a legal aid society in Hunter’s Point, San Francisco. To help them apply for a Google grant, I teamed up with a photographer to interview clients and tell their stories. Those stories reminded me why legal representation is so important, especially for people who lack resources. And the project helped the organization win $250,000.

I regularly swim in San Francisco Bay and other wild waters. I almost never wear a wetsuit, no matter how cold it gets. My wife says that the cold has frozen my brain so much that I can’t sense the cold anymore, but for me, open-water swimming is an exhilarating, refreshing, and even spiritual experience. It’s like a reset button for my brain.