Kendall Slee
contact@futureforecast.com | Printable Resume (Acrobat)

Portfolio

The Bakersfield Californian

I am currently a Senior Product Manager in the New Products group for The Bakersfield Californian. After years at extremely big, powerful media companies, I am having a ball focusing on small, well-defined, local communities. The most recent are Bakotopia.com, Masbakersfield.com and Northwestvoice.com. All three of these sites now run on the homegrown "Bakomatic" platform that I product manage. I should point out that Mas, a publication for second-generation Hispanics, has an entire editorial staff that I only support with the Web site, while they do all the real work. The same is true for Northwestvoice.com. The Northwest Voice was started by Mary Lou Fulton, and I only recently became responsible for the Web operations. However, I'm having fun taking it to the next level by adding things like user profiles and topical interest-based social networking.

Everything we do in the New Products group has two things in common: a) it empowers individuals to contribute content, and b) it's targeted at a specific demographic or psychographic interest group. Our little band of "survy elephants" (as the publisher refers to us) is making waves in the media industry, but not because of anything we do directly. We simply provide tools and a voice to our community members, and they're the ones who make it all work. In this way, I feel like my work at the Californian is the perfect job evolution that leverages all of my earlier experience in both content and community. And I firmly believe that in the future, people will come to see these two sides of the Internet as complementary, if not the same thing. Just try to fit a "blog" into one of these two boxes and you will see what I mean. While I work for the Californian, they let me telecommute from Colorado.

AOL's You've Got Pictures

This is America Online's digital picture sharing service. My latest job was to integrate YGP's features across the entire AOL network. We created one picture sharing experience for AOL mail, instant messaging, Member Directory and AOL Journals (Blogs product).

People Connection and AOL Chat

People Connection is the home of Chat on both AOL and the Internet, with a reach of 70% of AOL's 28 million members. We redesigned the page to be more relevant to social chatters, featuring chat rooms by time of day and highlighting interesting people in the community.

I also managed an upgrade to the chat advertising system to give advertisers more targeted opportunities.

Groups@AOL

This product offers private and public interactive web pages that let AOL members manage communities for family, friends or activity groups. A Group includes a private message area, photo gallery, shared calendar, buddy list and much more.

When Groups@AOL launched, C|Net declared it one of the "innovative additions to AOL 6.0 ... Groups @ AOL fits nicely with this ISP's online community focus and is the one big draws for both current members and new subscribers."

As the programming director and business manager for AOL, I set the strategy and goals for the product and oversaw the editorial programming. I also managed the product's marketing.

AOL Hometown

AOL Hometown is America Online's community of personal home pages. It makes it possible for anyone -- even your grandma -- to create a home page without knowing HTML.

As the programming director and business manager, I set the long-term strategy for the product and also manage editorial programming, marketing and promotion. I managed development of the1-2-3 Publish and EasyDesigner tools. By creating simple products and utilizing a targeted marketing plan, we were able to get AOL members to create 10 million home pages in just one year.

Knight Ridder / Tribune

One of my most interesting (and exhausting) jobs was at Knight Ridder Tribune Interactive, where I worked with a team of designers to create highly graphical, multimedia-rich Web packages each day. These mini-sites are distributed to subscribing Web sites, which then install them on their own servers. I spent equal time on researching/writing and design & layout. 

Here are a few packages that are still sitting around online. (Note: these live on sites that purchased syndication rights from KRT. The links can and do change often, so please accept my apologies if you encounter a broken link).

Washingtonpost.com

I developed my Web legs at washingtonpost.com as a member of the team that built first Digital Ink -- a proprietary service -- and then the popular web site. During that time , I developed a number of sections and features. Here are my favorites:

The Denver Post

Before the Web, I made my living as a feature writer and reporter for The Denver Post. Here are a few of my favorite stories: