Tara M. Walsh

About Me

Highly skilled and versatile editor with 15 years of experience writing, editing, and managing online and print content. Former managing editor for Brighthub.com's Desktop Publishing channel; rabid sports fan and sometime participator; sky watcher (my word for adult day dreamer); transplanted easterner living in heaven-on-earth Sonoma County, California; and saving best for last, partner to wonderful California girl and mama to two incredible boys.

My Awards & Certifications

I have 15 years of editing and writing experience in technical publishing, in print, books, and online.

My Experience

I am an independent editorial consultant, focused on providing professional editorial expertise to magazines, book publishers, and websites at corporations and nonprofits across the U.S.

In October 2010, I concluded a 15-month contract as the web content manager for a nonprofit watchdog group, where I wrote blogs, researched and summarized relevant news stories, and wrote weekly email newsletters. I also selected all of the images for the site, wrote headlines, and posted tweets on all newly published content.

From April 2008 to December 2009 I was Managing Editor for Brighthub.com's Desktop Publishing channel. Prior to that I was contracted with Bright Hub's startup team as Director of Content Community, where I was tasked with seeding the site with software reviews. I edited and published hundreds of software reviews over a ten-month website launch phase.

Prior to joining Bright Hub, I spent 8 years at O'Reilly Media (1998-2006), where initially I dabbled with the book side of editing, including co-editing first editions of Designing Web Audio and Hardware Hacking Projects for Geeks, before finding my passion for the online world. I went to work on the www.oreilly.com website in 2000 as Web Production Editor, where I learned some of the early tools of the online trade--HTML, vi, CSS, while also writing news blurbs and copy editing and producing articles by O'Reilly authors. When oreilly.com and the O'Reilly Network (www.oreillynet.com) joined forces in 2002, I was promoted to Online Publications Editor, recruiting newly minted O'Reilly authors to write articles that I would edit and publish on O'Reilly Network sites. I was promoted to O'Reilly Network Editor in 2004, continuing to recruit authors and edit articles before turning my focus in late 2005 to O'Reilly's nascent PDF publishing program, where I recruited authors, edited their material, and readied the PDFs for publication.

My editing career began at Ziff-Davis (1992-1998), where I learned the ropes of magazine publishing, first as a Research Editor, fact-checking all the articles in each month's edition of PC Computing magazine. When I was promoted to Copy Editor for the same magazine, I was responsible for editing copy, including substantial line editing, for 30 to 35 pages per month, as well as supervising copy flow through the production cycle, and quality control on all changes. I also wrote short reviews for The Source and edited Office Computing and Equip, quarterly magazine supplements to PC Computing.

My Latest Articles