About our Staff

About our Staff

California Newswire® has a highly experienced team of editors and working journalists who manage the content found in this online California lifestyle and news magazine.

Meet our Team:

• Cindy Holden
Cindy Holden has been an editor with the Neotrope News Network since 2004, and previously managed news content on Send2Press® Newswire. She is a part time photographer, and was born and raised in California.

• Jonas Sills
Jonas Sills is a professional singer, actor, conductor and teacher. Jonas covers entertainment news in So. Calif. for California Newswire®. He has a degree in Choral Vocal Music from California State University Long Beach with extensive study in Theater arts (www.jonassills.com).

• Christopher Laird Simmons
Christopher Simmons’ various hats have included direct marketing, art direction, illustration, journalism, music, photography, publishing, public relations, video editing, and Web development. He has been a non-stop entrepreneur since his teens — his first successful venture was a mail-order business selling movie memorabilia around the world at the age of 16.

He is frequently interviewed by publications as diverse as Entrepreneur, Chicago Post Tribune, PC World, and Trendwatch.

He has composed music themes for two cable TV programs, including the award-winning VidKidCo, produced by the Long Beach Museum of Art’s Video Annex. As a musician he performed in several bands in the ‘80s, including “Pets Gone Wild” ( www.petsgonewild.com ) that was featured in the L.A. Times Calendar section, and was an L.A. Weekly “band name of the week.” He released numerous independent self-produced albums of electronic music in the ‘80s under the name “Bluetoy,” which were played widely on late-night alternative music radio shows, and reviewed favorably in music magazines like Electronic Musician. He re-mastered and re-released the albums on CD under his own name between 1996 and 2000 (his CD Beserker is available on iTunes, Napster, CDbaby, Amazon.com).

He has also been on the launch team of numerous successful companies including MacMall, FindWhat.com (now MIVA), and Send2Press® Newswire.

He has developed over 500 Web sites since March of 1995, including e-commerce projects for Oprah Winfrey and the No Fear clothing company, and an online 10-hour e-learning video course for DentalHygieneReview. He is also considered one of the first “experts” in search engine optimization (SEO), creating a proprietary technology called ContextEngine® in 1996 which has evolved over the past decade along with search engines to help Web sites rank higher and “be found.”

He has art directed numerous magazines, and was the Chief Creative at the PhotoVentures ad agency from 1982-1987. He has won two Harvey Measurement awards for most responsive magazine advertising, and an ARPL design award from Apple Computer in 1993.

He has written for a wide variety of national and regional print publications including Computer Player, CrossMedia, Digital Imaging, Print on Demand Business, Micro Publishing News, Polyphony, Search Engine Intelligence, and Spazz. His business articles on graphic design and Web development were also reprinted by the Graphic Artist Guild in several issues of their member newspaper. He has been interviewed numerous times for Internet radio and Podcast programs over the past six years related to public relations and Internet marketing topics.

He is the founder and CEO of Neotrope® which is involved in entertainment, marketing and PR; both online and in traditional venues. He is a current member of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), and the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), and Graphic Artists Guild (GAG). As a public relations (PR) professional he works with companies of all sizes to help them “get ink” in the media and promote their brands and products. He has also served on the panel of judges for the PRSA Excellence in Tech Journalism Awards (2002, 2003, 2004 awards).

• Scott G (aka “The G-Man”)
Scott G owns G-Man Marketing, (www.gmanmarketing.com/) an advertising and communications firm in Los Angeles. If you have opened a newspaper, flipped through a magazine, or listened to the radio in the past two decades, your purchasing decisions have been influenced by his work.

Mr. G has created advertising campaigns for hundreds of clients, and most recently has written/produced radio commercials and corporate broadcasts for such as Goodrich, General Dynamics NASSCO, Verizon Wireless, Yale Hospital, American Cancer Society, DIRECTV, Micron, Legoland, the Auto Club and many more.

He is also the recording artist known as The G-Man, with his albums distributed by Delvian Records and available on Rhapsody and iTunes. He’s a voting member of NARAS (the Grammy organization) and regularly writes about communications, marketing and advertising for many publications and Web sites.