The Deadline Was Whenever the Press Had to Roll

He built the video platform the way he now builds everything: by specification. The same method produced the company website, rebuilt from the ground up to replace an old WordPress install: about 145 pages, among them 35 city pages and 97 property galleries, in 44 commits since February. It produced the admin panel that lets him add a shoot, reorder a portfolio of about 3,200 images and redeploy the site with one button, through a daemon that keeps the web tier from ever holding a shell. It produced the analytics he put in when he took Google’s trackers off the site, and the dozen-odd scheduled jobs that back up, monitor and patch the server. He directs the work. An AI writes the code, against a specification he writes first.

Almost everything he runs, he hosts himself, on the theory that a business should own its infrastructure rather than rent it from a vendor who may pivot, raise prices or disappear. The server patches itself and will not reboot while a video is encoding.

The specification says what the system must do, what it must never do and how he will know it is correct, and it exists before anything is built. The work goes out in small, scoped pieces rather than one heroic request. What comes back is read, exercised and checked for where it strays, and nothing is accepted until it has been verified against a live system, with a dated backup and a documented way to roll back already in place. He is precise about what he is: a product architect, not a software engineer. What he brings is the business. Thirty-five years across newsrooms, publications, operations and accounting tell him which requirements are right, which trade-offs are acceptable, and when a thing is subtly wrong even though it technically runs.

He writes the same way. In January 2024 he was stopped in traffic when an F-250 traveling roughly 75 miles an hour hit his car from behind. The crash left him with severe spinal and nerve damage and a traumatic brain injury, with persistent post-concussive symptoms that have made speech and language steadily harder as time goes on. So for the essays in the Notebook, Claude, Anthropic’s AI, serves as his wordsmith. “The thoughts are 100 percent mine,” he says. “Claude is the wordsmith.” He goes over every draft painstakingly, prompting and changing it until the words say what he thinks. Nothing runs until he has reviewed and revised every line. The machines do the typing. He remains firmly in charge of the thinking.

In January 2026 he founded BLUFify Media, a two-person Arizona company that applied the intelligence community’s analytic tradecraft to everyday news. Ninety outlets were graded separately on bias and on factuality. Confidence language was tied to evidence thresholds under ICD 203, the standard analysts use for saying how sure they are. A second model checked the first for anything it had made up. At its peak the platform tracked 177 sources across 14 sectors and produced 1,864 briefings, three a day, on 23,645 lines of Python that he directed and did not write. It paused in May under bootstrap funding pressure, documented for relaunch, every file carrying a checksum. It never had a paying customer. He volunteers that before anyone asks, which is about what you would hope from a man who built a platform around calibrated confidence.

He was 16 when he started at a local newspaper, where production meant newsprint on enormous spools, paste-up and pica rules. He worked in display advertising, and reporters came to find him when they needed a table or a chart built to run beside a story. You learned accuracy, he says, because a mistake was permanent: there was no editing a story once 50,000 copies were on the trucks. He has watched every transition since from the inside: desktop publishing replacing paste-up, the web replacing the press run, digital replacing film. He regards AI as the same shape of event, the distance between the person with the idea and the finished product collapsing once again. The pattern holds. Whoever understood the work before the tool arrived understood it after.

In between there was a great deal of paperwork, and he was good at it. He kept payroll tax accounts at Rockwell’s space and defense division in Seal Beach, California, while Boeing was buying it. The office updated its multi-state tax tables by dialing in and downloading each change by itself. He replaced that with a single file pulled off the web. He ran communications and technology for the Cerritos Chamber of Commerce: two staff and an intern, a weekly bulletin, a monthly print edition, a seat at the legislative committee. He also moved the membership list off a system nobody else could operate. That, he says, is where he learned business: from sitting between shop owners, executives and elected officials and having to work out what each of them needed. Then Keaʻau, Hawaii, as full-charge bookkeeper for a disability services provider: a $3 million budget, 40 people on payroll, Medicaid, grant reports and a three-month backlog he cleared in a week.

From 2006 to 2018 he also wrote résumés for other people, as a Certified Professional Résumé Writer, under the name CareerCritical. His clients ranged from IT executives to a former deputy assistant director of the U.S. Secret Service. He describes résumé writing as editorial work: interview someone, find the story in what they have done, write it so a specific reader acts on it. The camera was there the whole time. His news photographs ran on KOMO, KING, KIRO and Q13 in Seattle, and in USA Today. The city of Burien put one on the cover of its 2017 spring recreation guide, 10,000 copies, a dog park. Since moving to Arizona he has covered election protests, migrants crossing the border and Jacob Chansley, the man the country knows as the QAnon Shaman, for Getty Images and Shutterstock.

He lives in Queen Creek, at the southeastern edge of the Phoenix metro, with Bella, a rescue, part Australian Koolie, a herding breed with no sheep, so she herds him, mostly toward the car. Their days off are road trips with a camera and a drone, to the places Arizona has forgotten: abandoned buildings and once-important sites that have faded into the desert and stay barely visible until someone goes looking with a purposeful eye. She stays home on shoot days. The houses are not hers to herd.