Bio

Mónica Guzmán is a journalist and community strategist who craves conversation and seeks out technology that makes it easy, far-reaching and good.

Last fall, she joined the team at GeekWire as a part-time columnist on issues in digital life and began to leverage her insights into online communities as a community strategist for startups and media. Previously, she spent a year helping Seattle-based startup Intersect launch and develop an innovative time and location based storytelling platform. From January 2007 to May 2010, Mónica was a reporter at seattlepi.com, where she ran the experimental and award-winning Big Blog and drew a community of readers with nonstop online conversation and casual weekly meetups.

Exploring ways to engage readers made Mónica into an online news evangelist; since 2007 she’s spoken about online communities, new tools for engagement, and why she and so many like her bother to share their lives, ideas, and even locations on sites like Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare (short answer: because it’s fun).

Mónica joined the National Advisory Board at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Florida in January 2012 and serves as board secretary for the Western Washington Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists in Seattle. She sits on the advisory board for the University of Washington Information School’s Masters in Science and Information Management program and is a co-founder of NewsNext, a monthly mixer and speaker series for Seattle-area journalists.

In September 2010, Mónica traveled to El Salvador, where she spoke to Salvadoran journalists and students about new tools in digital media during a weeklong program sponsored by the U.S. State Department.

She’s been named one of the Top 100 Women in Seattle Tech, one of the Poynter Institute’s 35 social media influencers and one of the Society of Professional Journalists’ “Quill” magazine’s 20 journalists to follow on Twitter. It’s awkward, but she was once voted “Seattle’s Sexiest Blogger.”

Before she made Seattle home, Mónica reported for the Houston Chronicle and Michigan’s Midland Daily News as a Hearst Newspapers Fellow. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Sociology and Film Studies from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine.

Mónica is a big fan of Billy Joel, Battlestar Galactica, cheap parking, boots and chocolate. In 2010, she married her partner in geekdom, Jason Preston.