MERREDITH BRANSCOMBE

I'm the Mass Media Director of The Hoffman Agency -- a private, global, tech-only public relations agency. I work with companies both behemoth and tiny to help figure out how to tell their stories in the mass media and the blogosphere. As a company, we're less interested in the old model of "messaging" than in engagement -- and my job is to help companies, their execs and employees, discover their stories and tell them at a high level.

To that end, I read like a fiend, looking for the intersections of trends and natural curiousity. Though my Agency is tech-only, we define it pretty broadly, so my interests range from business innovation to social media to solar to deep tech, and even the legal issues that burgeon around Silicon Valley.

My background is in journalism; I got into PR with a crisis communications firm. My work for the Discovery and Learning Channels was pre-While You Were Out; I wrote and produced shows focused mostly on technology and education. Which was a lovely place to be: it trained me to always be ready to dump my assumptions, be ready to explain complexity in simple terms, and to meet smart people truly thinking differently, working hard to make their piece of the world better.