Dan Pacheco

I’m a journalist by training, and technologist by choice with 15 years of experience in online community, social media and user-contributed content in both traditional and digital media companies. Most recently, I founded a startup called FeedBrewer, a publish-once, distribute-everywhere tool that reduces the barriers to entry to cross-media publishing. We run an eBook publishing service called BookBrewer (http://bookbrewer.com) that helps anyone create and distribute an eBook to any major eBook retailer. We also run the eBook publishing service for Borders: http://borders.bookbrewer.com. I earned my “web legs” at Washingtonpost.com, where I was one of their first online producers. I helped launch their first web message boards and launched its first business and technology sections. I later joined America Online and spent 6 years working on mostly web-based community products. I had key content & product leadership roles for AOL Groups, Hometown (personal home pages, pre-blog) and You’ve Got Pictures. After AOL, I shifted gears and went hyperlocal as Senior Manager of Digital Products for The Bakersfield Californian newspaper, where we created numerous social networks and citizen journalism sites that are considered among the first of their kind within U.S. newspapers. The Northwest Voice (first U.S. newspaper citizen journalism initiative in 2004) and Bakotopia.com (one of the first newspaper-run social networks) are the two most well-known initiatives. While at the Californian I also ran a highly-publicized Knight News Challenge-funded project called Printcasting that makes it possible for anyone to create a printable PDF magazine using content from Web feeds. FeedBrewer grew directly out of Printcasting. My work has garnered numerous awards over the years, including: * The National Association of Newspapers’ “20 Under 40” award in 2005. * An “Edgie” award for Bakotopia.com in 2006. * A Knight-Batten Award for Innovation in Journalism for the Bakomatic Social Media Platform in 2006, and another for Printcasting in 2009. * A Knight News Challenge grant for $837,000 to develop Printcasting.