Category: Articles

Eight-month project to update and rebuild a previous 100-plus page document on how to build a municipal fiber-optic broadband network, geared towards rural and small-town areas of Michigan. The client was Merit Network, a Michigan ISP for universities and other public entities that manages a 4,000-mile fiber-optic network of its own.

This involved intensive editing, rewriting and new writing, while reorganizing and boiling the content down to a more manageable 63 pages. I wrote roughly the first half from scratch, adding new information to report on the state of the digital divide in Michigan, through interviews with subject-matter experts and community leaders as well as long hours of reviewing related materials.

I also found the graphic designer for this project and led the painstaking coordination of putting the final piece together. This occurred through about a dozen revisions, in addition to changes based on reviews from various staff members on the client side.

To be clear, I’m no broadband expert, just as I’m no IPv6 expert. I had only consumer-level knowledge of this topic before beginning this project. Using tried-and-true interviewing techniques, I’m able to go from zero to expert-level article in two days. I’ve done this for arcane legal, engineering, healthcare, financial, and technology subject matter. I have been exercising these skills since I was a teenager: first as a copywriter and proofreader, then as a business journalist, then as a broadcast news producer, and then full circle back to copywriting again.

Report written for Merit Network, a nonprofit that serves as the ISP for Michigan public universities (and whose roots in “internet” technology date back to before the word existed).

This project took about seven months in 2021, calling for a deep dive into the second-generation internet protocol IPv6 and how it relates to higher education institutions. Project involved close work with networking engineers across the U.S. and the boiling of complex, arcane information into a succinct, digestible form for high-level university administrators. A very challenging but satisfying piece of work.