About

Welcome to CatchingFlack.com, the home of Jon Greer’s PR blog formerly on BNET.com. You can find all the blog posts I did for BNET here, as well as all the posts from my predecessor blog, 21st Century Media Relations.

This blog is about doing PR [better], how the media is changing, how social media is evolving, and anything else I feel like commenting on (hey, it’s my blog).

In my career, I’m a PR jack-of-all-trades, doing everything from freelance writing to media training to working with teams of other contractors (web designers, graphic artists, et al.) to provide direct PR services.

I’ve done most of my work in the technology professional services sector — the VCs, law firms and investment banks circling around Silicon Valley.

I’ve also served major corporations and start-ups, and been a blogger for BNET and a trainer and moderator for Bulldog Reporter, leading PR University training sessions on media relations and on a range of other PR subjects.

I started serving clients as an independent consultant in 1997. Before that, I was a VP of Edelman Public Relations Worldwide in the San Francisco office, where my practice focused on health care technology and media relations.

I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1981 and have now lived in San Jose (briefly), Palo Alto, San Francisco and for the last 17 years, Oakland and Emeryville in the East Bay.

I (seriously) feel like I am living in Florence during the Renaissance, with the likes of the Google, Yahoo, eBay, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter boys running around, and with the incredible talent present that started Silicon Valley and the technology revolution (like Steve Jobs, Andy Grove, the late Al Shugart, Larry Sonsini, and Thom Weisel, to name a few), as well everyone else who makes up this incredible region.

I first came to the Bay Area to be a business reporter for the San Jose Mercury News and then moved to the San Francisco Chronicle before leaving journalism, so I had a front-row seat for much of this.

I got a bachelor’s degree in economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a master’s degree in journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

In the rest of my life, I’m a big Bruce Springsteen fan, a Unitarian Universalist, a father of two and a husband of one, a skier, hiker, crossword puzzle doer, and newly minted Spinning step aerobics enthusiast. Really.