1. Bio for Steven Spenser
Principal, Praxis Communication
In the last 22 years, Steven Spenser has managed corporate communications
and PR for several Seattle-area tech firms, start-ups and non-profits, and has con-
sulted for PR firms in the Northwest, Silicon Valley, Canada and on the East Coast.
Steven provided PR counsel to the government of the Russian Federation for the
launch of its first new U.S. diplomatic office in 40 years, and received the thanks of
President Bill Clinton for his international media-relations assistance during the Seattle
Ministerial Round of the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum. He gained
his initial expertise in crisis management when he was the only PR professional in the
nation to respond to the pleas of Seattle’s E. coli victims for help organizing against
Jack in the Box after the deaths of four children.
Steven's launch-marketing and publicity successes played a principal role in the
transformation of a Redmond Internet start-up into a $200 million company with
$20 million in annual revenue. Its Web software attracted 4 million product downloads
in its first 2 years and was selected as one of the “Top 10 Downloads of the Millenn-
ium.”
Steven recently provided PR and marketing counsel for the Northwest chapter of
the Starlight Children's Foundation, a charity founded by Steven Spielberg to help
seriously ill children and their families. Steven generated the chapter's greatest amount
of publicity in eight years, securing print, TV and online coverage for special events
across Western Washington. He also played a principal role in the success of the
chapter’s biggest annual fundraiser, liaising with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts
and Sciences during the 81st, 82nd and 83rd Annual Academy Awards® to promote the
Academy’s only Oscars®-related charity program in an 8-state area.
In addition to running his consulting practice, Steven finds time to serve as the
Group Manager of "Network of PR Professionals," the oldest and largest networking
group on LinkedIn devoted exclusively to discussing the theory and practice of PR and
marketing communication. A prolific PR essayist, Steven is a frequent contributor to
other PR discussion groups on LinkedIn.
A former editor and free-lance writer with The Associated Press, in 1992 Steven
broke a series of four articles investigating Asian-government support of Pacific Ocean
pirates and their ties to American corporations. That same year, he was the first journ-
alist in the nation to report about HIV-2, an unscreened, mutant strain of the AIDS virus
infecting the U.S. blood supply. Just three months after Steven’s exposé, the U.S.
Food and Drug Administration, which had resisted requiring donated blood to be tested
for HIV-2, issued a recommendation for all U.S. blood- and plasma-collection establish-
ments to begin screening for the new strain.
After a stint as a copy editor on the news desk of The Seattle Times (becoming
the paper’s first desk editor ever hired with no previous major-paper experience, intern-
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2. ship or journalism degree), Steven was asked to become a restaurant critic and travel
writer for The Times. Later, he was a regular columnist, critic and feature writer for a
Times-owned newspaper.
Steven’s news- and public-relations writing has won awards from the Society for
Professional Journalists, the Washington Press Association and the Public Relations
Society of America. In 1993, the Arthritis Foundation acknowledged his success in
securing much of the cast of CBS-TV's "Northern Exposure" for the Washington
chapter’s annual telethon and PSAs—as well as the chapter’s first successful publicity
in four years—with the Arthritis Foundation Distinguished Public Service Award.
During World War II, Steven’s mother was a research chemist at the Chicago
campus of the Manhattan Project, the supersecret U.S. program which built the world’s
first atomic bomb. (Two other relatives also worked for the Project.) At the same time,
his father, a B-17 pilot shot down on his 20th mission, was a P.O.W. in the German
camp from which “The Great Escape” was made. Shortly after the war, they met,
married, and were stationed (ironically) at a U.S. Air Force base in Japan.
Following in his family’s nuclear footsteps, Steven was trained as a nuclear
engineer in the U.S. Navy, where he received a U.S. Government SECRET security
clearance to study and work on nuclear reactors. While in the Navy, he managed
$2 million in shipboard accounts as a divisional budget manager; served as a safety
officer, master-at-arms (policeman) and TV/radio news anchor; and once steered the
world’s largest warship—the nuclear aircraft carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN-69)—
without being able to see where it was going.
Steven was a member of the first U.S. military unit to respond to the 1983 bomb-
ing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, and was part of the task force that challenged
Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's “Line of Death” in the waters of the Gulf of Sidra.
His service also included being threatened with suicide-bomb attacks by Hezbollah off
the coast of Syria, and rendezvousing with President Reagan off Normandy’s Omaha
Beach at the 40th anniversary of D-Day.
While serving on several emergency-responder teams, Steven sometimes dir-
ected battle-damage response, firefighting, rescues and first aid in crises throughout
the Eisenhower. He was a member of an elite, crackerjack crew whose successful
efforts on special missions earned their ship unit commendations equivalent to the
Silver Star and the Bronze Star for distinguished action with outstanding heroism.
Steven has trekked through the rain forest to Angel Falls (the world’s tallest),
SCUBA-dived in shark-infested Caribbean wrecks, and rafted some of the most dang-
erous whitewater rivers in North America. He has climbed five stratovolcanoes on two
continents, including three of the potentially deadly Decade Volcanoes: Vesuvius,
Etna, and Mount Rainier.
A widely traveled globetrotter able to curse in nine languages during his naval
career, Steven employs his own "tourist post-card method" of sightseeing navigation,
and claims that successful travelers need only master five specific phrases in any
language. In his travels he has explored ancient mysteries at Stonehenge; slipped
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3. through a moonlit, empty Parthenon at midnight; climbed to the top of St. Peter's in the
Vatican; and knelt in the coolness of the immense Dome of the Rock in the Muslim
Quarter of Old Jerusalem.
Once a next-door neighbor of Generalissimo Francisco Franco in Madrid, Steven
has been robbed by virginal Gypsies in Rome, eluded anti-American mobs in Athens,
and gambled the night away at Monaco’s famed Monte Carlo casino (leaving with two
chips still in his pocket).
Steven is a self-taught pianist who has composed several dozen copyrighted
songs and instrumentals which are being compiled for a studio recording, and he has
received inquiries for screenplay options based on the book of seriocomic autobio-
graphical essays he is writing. He owns more than 1,700 classic films, enjoys fencing,
petanque, lawn bowling and racket sports, and collects gargoyles, aboriginal masks
and Christmas-music albums.
His other interests include odd and archaic words and derivations; writing for
NPR's "Says You"; trivia about the Oscars, U.S. presidents and world geography;
reading history; political science; and lobbying state legislators and members of Con-
gress. Steven’s life goals include visiting Antarctica; racing around the world; running
for President; and becoming a member of the U.S. Electoral College.
Steven’s parents met on a blind date, and, to this day, he maintains that the best
writing he has ever produced was the detailed personals ad that prompted a memor-
able response from the woman who—six months and one intervening “Storm of the
Century” hurricane later—became his wife of 26 years. He and his bride live in Seattle
with their 12-year-old son and three cats, along with a backyard menagerie of four
peanut-trained Stellar’s blue jays, three peripatetic possums, two dive-bombing rufous
hummingbirds, and an aggressive woodpecker intent on reducing the Spenser home to
kindling.
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