Karen Wickre is a veteran connector, editor, and communicator, and has worked in and around Silicon Valley long enough to have appeared in WIRED 1.4. (Even before that, she wrote one of the very first guides to what we used to call “the World Wide Web,” and now it’s an amusing relic of a more innocent time.) As a corporate writer, She has developed stories, styles and cadence for Google, Twitter, and many startups. As an early Googler (she joined when there were 500 employees; she left nine years later, when there were 50,000), She has been in her share of war rooms and fire drills, and have crafted scores of posts covering products and pivots, shakeups, corporate apologies and company culture. More recently she advised a range of companies that want a strategy (or a reality check) on their messages and the content they produce. Karen is also a strong supporter of journalists and journalism, and currently serves on the boards of The John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships at Stanford and the News Literacy Project. One of her joys is having co-founded, with Jenny 8. Lee and help from Google and the Knight Foundation, a yearly unconference called Newsgeist, where a small group of news producers mix it up with news gatherers and developers. In a nod to her long-time status as a San Franciscan, she is also on the board of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.