Susan Mernit: Inspired by Change. A Woman's Voice

Susan Mernit: Inspired by change

A Woman’s Voice lecture series.
Susan Mernit began her career as a poet & arts activist, teaching children in Harlem and adults in rural Ohio and running a small press magazine. Drawn to the internet before the web (Mozilla) existed, she convinced Scholastic, her book & magazine publisher employer, to go online—and ended up creating one of the first consumer web sites. Since then, Mernit has had a career marked by both change & innovation—as an online news pioneer, Netscape & AOL VP, Yahoo! Senior Director, and now founder of Oakland Local, a new community news site for Oakland, and co-founder of Public Media Collaborative, a volunteer group focused on social media training for nonprofits & community groups. She is also a contributing editor at BlogHer, a blogger, and a volunteer group focused on training nonprofits, ethnic media & community groups on using social media tools. A popular trainer and speaker, Mernit works regularly with The Knight Digital Media Center at USC's Annenberg School, and with The Maynard Institute, and will chair the Keynote program chair for the October 2009 Online News Association conference in San Francisco.
Along the way, she’s had a helluva lot of fun—and a couple of sobering failures. Come talk with Susan Mernit about her perspectives on thriving on change, doing what you love, and surviving failure, as well as her experience as an online pioneer and troublemaker.

Founded in the late 19th century to promote good design practices in the Berkeley hills, the Hillside Club today is a community-based membership organization that promotes art and culture in the community and is completely owned and run by its members.

The Hillside Club,
2286 Cedar Street (at Arch)
Berkeley CA 94709