About me — and why I’ve started this blog

Here’s a little background on my job/career path and a little more about why I’ve started this blog.

If there are any particular threads or themes that have run throughout my career, they would be these: media (newspapers, mostly); public relations, media relations, and communications; higher education; and public policy/politics/government.

My name is Alan Janesch, and my background includes stints on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., in higher education
communications at Penn State and Bucknell University, and as a newspaper reporter.

I lived most of my pre-college life in Coopersburg, a small borough in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. After graduating from Southern Lehigh High School, I went to Penn State, where I earned two degrees in English, a BA and a master’s. The first I earned as an undergraduate, the second while I was a full-time employee in Penn State’s public information office (about 1993-2000, roughly). After that, I went 60 miles east to Bucknell University, where I worked as Bucknell’s associate director of communications.

But I stayed at Bucknell only about four years. Since January 2005 I’ve been working at the Penn State Alumni Association. (By the way, working for the alumni association of your alma mater is a pretty good gig.) I’m director of the alumni association’s legislative education and advocacy program, a.k.a. the Penn State Grassroots Network.

I won’t go into detail here about my current job, since that’s not what this blog is about. But if you’d like to know more about the Network and what it does, please go to www. alumni.psu.edu/grassroots

Before I started the higher ed phase of my career, I worked in Washington, D.C., for 12 years, mostly for the National Governors Association. I also worked for a couple of years for a small non-profit in D.C. and before that I was the press aide for former U.S. Rep. Don Ritter, who represented the Lehigh Valley area (that is, more or less, the Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton area).

Before taking the job with Ritter, I wrote about newspaper technology for “presstime,” the monthly journal of what was then called the American Newspaper Publishers Association and is now called the Newspaper Association of America. Before that, I was a reporter for The Morning Call (Allentown, Pa.) and The Globe-Times (Bethlehem, Pa.), now The Express-Times (Easton, Pa.).

So, to boil things down, writing has always been an important part of my life and my work. And it’s often been focused on persuasive writing — writing that was meant to influence people’s opinions about people, institutions, or things, and/or to urge them to take a particular course of action.

Almost every day of my working life, I’ve been writing something: newspaper stories, news releases, speeches, talking points, ads, proposals, email blasts, one-on-one emails. whatever.

But other than some short stories (done mostly while I was an undergrad or working on my master’s), a sonnet or two, and a handful of freelance pieces for magazines, I haven’t really done much of what you might call creative writing.

To get my BA from Penn State (I was in an honors English program), I had to write a thesis — and happily for me, the English Department allowed me to fulfill that obligation by writing a long odd fiction piece that was then kind of an obsession with me. My advisor was a Penn State English prof and comic novelist named Thomas Rogers (more about him in a future blog, I’m sure); I remained friends with him long after graduation.

He and his wife, Jacquie, threw wonderful parties at their home in State College and were kind enough to invite me there often. I remember clearly in those days (my newspaper days) how they would ask me: “Are you writing?” Of course, I would respond — I’m writing every day.

But I wasn’t doing the kind of creative writing they were talking about.

I think maybe this blog is a way to help me start using my own “voice” and to start doing that kind of writing.

More later.