Silas Lyons
Silas Lyons has been the Record Searchlight’s editor and vice president of new media content for three years, and has lived in the north state since 2006. During that time the newsroom has taken over complete responsibility for digital content and the audience on Redding.com has grown to about 4 million page views a month. The paper has been recognized with regional, national and company awards for breaking news, business reporting, feature writing, commentary and efforts on behalf of freedom of information during his tenure.
Silas has helped lead efforts at the Record Searchlight and within its parent company, E.W. Scripps, to use social media as a tool for newsgathering and audience development. The Record Searchlight is among a small group of newspapers in the U.S. that have signed up the entire editorial staff on Twitter and made it part of daily workflow. His personal Twitter account is @silaslyons_RS.
Before joining the Record Searchlight, Silas worked at The Tribune in San Luis Obispo. A journalism graduate of Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, he began his newspaper career in 1994 as a summer reporting intern for The Monterey County Herald. He has also interned at the Sacramento Bee and lived and worked in Germany for a year and a half.
He lives in Redding with his wife, Kristen, and four-year-old son, Emerson.
Doni Greenberg
Doni Greenberg is an independent online journalist. She founded what’s now known as anewscafe.com in 2007 with son Joe Domke of the Czech Republic. Prior to 2007 she was an award-winning newspaper opinion columnist, feature and food writer recognized by the Associated Press, the California Newspaper Publishers Association and E.W. Scripps. She lives in Northern California, in the tiny town of Igo.
Donna Eyestone
In 1989 Donna combined her interests in music and technology to complete a B.A. in Computer Music Composition from Clark University – long before there was an actual “multimedia” field. In 1991 she received an M.F.A in Electronic Music Recording from the Mills College Center for Contemporary Music and then went on to receive a second M.F.A. in Integrated Electronics Arts from Rensselear Polytechnic Institute in 1996. It was then that Donna began teaching multimedia in the Bay Area. Her Digital Media Skills course has won awards for online learning from both @ONE and the U.S. Distance Learning Association.
Donna has taught courses in audio production, website and graphic design, and multimedia. In 1999 she became a multimedia content developer for Apple, designing online training for their iLife applications (while continuing teaching an online course for CCSF). She “retired” from Apple to raise her daughter and continues to teach part-time for City College of San Francisco, Lake Tahoe Community College, and @ONE - the technology training organization for CCC faculty.
Joe Quirk
Joe Quirk is the author of “It's Not You. It's Biology: The Science of Love, Sex & Relationships,” a SF Chronicle bestseller translated into 18 languages. His Pixar-illustrated Powerpoint talk is popular with college student audiences.
Quirk is also a bestselling novelist. He is the author of The Ultimate Rush, an action thriller about rollerblading, and a new novel, Exult, about hang gliders who live out the Icarus myth.
Ever prolific, Joe also completed his second smart-ass science book, Tools Are From Men, Talk Is From Women; The Science of Why Your Partner’s Brain is Weird.
Ransom Stephens
The author of The God Patent is. . . Ransom Stephens, Ph.D.
Ransom Stephens, Ph.D., is a professor of particle physics turned writer and speaker. He has worked on experiments at SLAC, Fermilab, CERN, and Cornell; discovered a new type of matter and was on the team that discovered the top quark. During the tech boom that ended in 2001, he directed patent development for a wireless web startup and, a few years later, became an expert on timing noise (aka, jitter) which is what paid his bills while he wrote The God Patent.
Ransom lives in Petaluma, California and makes a living by writing novels, giving speeches, producing and MCing literary events, helping engineers solve problems, and teaching writing seminars. He is the author of over 200 articles on impossible subjects like quantum physics, the future of publishing and parenting teenagers.
His first novel, The God Patent, is set in the battle between science and religion over the nature of the soul and the origin of the universe. The story is wrapped around the role of faith in both science and religion and concludes with a surly adolescent math prodigy’s discovery of the nature of the eternal soul.