About our Editorial Team

Florida Newswire™ is a publication of the Neotrope® News Network.
We have staff all over the U.S. who write for us exclusively, and an editorial team with professional journalism credentials. We are not “bloggers” or a news aggregator. We create original content, and report on regional news, as well as pull national news from our own network, based entirely in the U.S.A.

MEET OUR TEAM

Jennifer Hedly

Jennifer is the managing content editor for Florida Newswire™, and has been a team member of the Neotrope® News Network since Dec. 2008. She is a creative writer, former surfer girl, and currently resides in South Florida. She paints, is a foodie, and owns two pure white tabby cats who prefer their identities be kept secret (and no, they don’t have their own Facebook page).

Liisa Sullivan

Liisa writes for several national and regional magazines; daily and weekly newspapers; and business-to-business newsletters. Before joining the Neotrope News Network, she worked as an editor for a national medical publishing company where she managed a team of writers and did market research for new launches. Liisa also worked in the catering business for several years, and as a result, specializes in writing about the food and beverage business and has two monthly columns that feature chefs and wine experts.

Liisa received her Masters in Media Studies from the New School for Social Research in New York City and is currently a member of the Public Relations Association of Western North Carolina. She resides in the beautiful town of Asheville, NC in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains; she lives there with her husband, Bryan and Black lab, Annie.

Christopher Simmons

Christopher Laird Simmons is the founder and President of Neotrope® which is involved in entertainment, marketing and PR; both online and in traditional venues. He is a current member of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), and the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP).

He has written for a wide variety of national and regional print publications including Computer Player, CrossMedia, Digital Imaging, Print on Demand Business, Micro Publishing News, Polyphony, Search Engine Intelligence, and Spazz. His business articles on graphic design and Web development were also reprinted by the Graphic Artist Guild in several issues of their member newspaper. As the founder of a small publishing company (Mindset Press, now Neotrope Press), he developed over thirty small press publications and “fanzines” between 1987 and 1990, including one that was featured in the “potpourri” section of Playboy magazine. He is the author of a digital art book, fractopia (2008, Neotrope Press, ISBN 978-0-9710555-0-6 hardcover).

He has art directed numerous magazines, and was the Chief Creative at the PhotoVentures ad agency from 1982-1987. He has won two Harvey Measurement awards for most responsive magazine advertising, and an ARPL design award from Apple Computer in 1993.

He has been widely interviewed by publications like PC World on Linux Web hosting (he operated a Web hosting business from 1997 to 2005), TrendWatch on PDF technology, three times by Entrepreneur magazine on PR and marketing (2003, 2005, 2006), and been invited to speak at Seybold, and the annual meeting of the American Intellectual Property Law Association, among others. He has been interviewed numerous times for Internet radio and Podcast programs over the past six years related to public relations and Internet marketing topics.

As a photographer he has won numerous “best of show” awards for abstract, glamour, and portrait imagery. He has also created photographic and 3-D imagery for over three dozen national magazine covers. His abstract digital artwork was selected as the cover for the 1997 Science and Technology Course Catalog for the California State University Long Beach (CSULB) and has been featured in numerous major art installations including the 1997 Bytes of Art project in San Francisco. He created his first computer graphics for the Adventure International Atari 8-bit computer game Stone of Sisyphus in 1983.

He has composed music themes for two cable TV programs, including the award-winning VidKidCo, produced by the Long Beach Museum of Art’s Video Annex. As a musician he performed in several bands in the ’80s, including “Pets Gone Wild” ( www.petsgonewild.com ) that was featured in the L.A. Times Calendar section, and was an L.A. Weekly “band name of the week.” He released numerous independent self-produced albums of electronic music in the ’80s under the name “Bluetoy,” which were played widely on late-night alternative music radio shows, and reviewed favorably in music magazines like Electronic Musician. He re-mastered and re-released the albums on CD under his own name between 1996 and 2000 (his CD Beserker is available on iTunes, Napster, CDbaby, Amazon.com).

Florida Newswire™ is a trademark and service mark of NEOTROPE®, all rights reserved. Neotrope is a registered trademark in the U.S. and other countries.