About Me

I’m originally from New Orleans, Louisiana, but call Baton Rouge home.

My first real experience with publishing and journalism was in Qingdao, China, where I managed The Corner Jazz Club and co-founded an English entertainment guide for the 2008 co-host Olympic city in 2002.

In 2005, I assumed the managing editor position of Ringier AG’s City Weekend, a 100,000-circulation bi-weekly English entertainment magazine and website for Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, China. My responsibilities there included editorial planning, production and management. I also worked closely with a great Web development company, Exoweb, to help build a unique content management system that published user, editor and database-generated material into City Weekend’s email, mobile and print products. During my seven years in China, I learned spoken Chinese.

After City Weekend, I earned my M.S. in Digital Media at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism in New York City. I spent a lot of time working with Final Cut and Flash, as well as learning more about the business of digital publishing. My classmate, Chris Kieffer, and I produced a documentary video and Web site,  www.hoopknight.com, that documented the 2009 season of the Mount Vernon Knights, a high school boy’s basketball team. The project was (briefly) featured on Sports Illustrated Web site, ESPN Web site and Slam magazine.

In June 2009, I moved to Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam to help build Ringier Vietnam as general manager. I inherited a weekly mass-market women’s magazine and a family cooking magazine (all in Vietnamese) (No, I don’t speak fluent Vietnamese). (See Publishing Projects.) My biggest project-to-date is launching ELLE magazine in Vietnam. I’ve also been developing a network of special interest women’s websites. The first one is Marry.vn, an online wedding planner. Marry.vn has already become the largest wedding social-community and directory in Vietnam.

I thrive on good hoppy beer and bourbon whiskey; clear my head with a run, eat all things spicy, love Louisiana seafood, play “swamp bocce” whenever I get a chance, enjoy mountain biking, kite surfing and the occasional Frisbee toss. I try to wear vintage Casio calculator watches and generally describe myself as a closet geek.

I’d like to think this book passage helps explains a little more about me:

“Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next – and disappear. That’s why it’s so important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.”

- Joshua Foer in Moonwalking with Einstein

Contact me

ctcrowell[at]gmail[dot]com