I write. You read. Everybody laughs.
I’m Maia Nolan-Partnow, a Milwaukee-based content consultant, recovering journalist, craftaholic, lipstick addict, and opinion-haver.
• Check out my latest blog posts
• Mini-Course: Turn Your Instagram Into A Blog
• Find me on LinkedIn
Previously I served as Chief Brand Officer for Alaska Dispatch News, a role in which I worked on marketing as well as researching and developing new revenue-generating products with two objectives:
1. High-quality content for our audiences.
2. Valuable, effective marketing opportunities for our clients.
From 2009 until 2011 I was a full-time editor at Alaska Dispatch, Alaska’s online news site, working with the news team that won the 2011 Best of the West award in Breaking News Reporting for coverage of a 2010 plane crash that killed five including former Sen. Ted Stevens, as well as 2010 Alaska Press Club awards for investigative reporting and public service and the Howard Rock Tom Snapp First Amendment Award for coverage of the 2010 U.S. Senate race. I also helped guide our (also award-winning, NBD) social media strategy in those early days of doing business on Facebook and Twitter.
I returned to Alaska Dispatch in 2013 as assistant managing editor, a role in which I continued after our purchase of the Anchorage Daily News in 2014. In 2015, I left the newsroom to launch ADN’s Special Content Department, building a creative team that produced magazines, special sections, social media promotions and sponsored content (native advertising). The establishment of this department made ADN the very first news organization in Alaska to have its own in-house branded content studio.
I later took over leadership of the advertising sales department as well, and before becoming CBO in 2017, I led a restructure of both of these departments into a single Marketing Services Department designed to provide agency-style service to all Alaska businesses, organizations and individuals regardless of budget.
In between my newsroom tours, I was a full-time advertising copywriter working on creative campaigns for clients in the retail, tourism, oil and gas, hospitality and logistics industries, as well as government and nonprofit agencies.
I’ve been blogging since 2004, sometimes brilliantly, sometimes sporadically, occasionally very stupidly, and always in my own unique way.
Here are some things Maia Nolan-Partnow has accomplished, in the third person so it seems less braggy:
Maia Nolan-Partnow’s writing has been called “witty” and “quirky” by political journalist Eric Boehlert, who discussed her treatment of the 2008 presidential election in his book Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press. In 2008, Maia received a Rasmuson Foundation Individual Artist Award and was named Alaska’s top blogger by PurpleStates.tv, which selected her to represent the state in its 50/50/50 project. “8 Stars of Gold,” a play Maia co-wrote with Ryan Conarro in celebration of Alaska’s 50th anniversary of statehood, premiered at Perseverance Theatre in April 2009, and was presented on the mainstage at the Last Frontier Theatre Conference in June 2009. In 2015, she was asked to contribute a play to Cyrano’s “Ten Decades, Ten Plays” project celebrating the Anchorage Centennial; her script framed the city’s rapid growth from 1975 to 1985 through a group of attorneys who put the town on trial for “improper seizure of opportunity.” She once complained on her blog about not winning any awards and was subsequently honored with a municipal proclamation by then-Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich.
Maia has a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of Portland and a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from the University of Alaska Anchorage. She lives in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, with her husband, two children, and an undisclosed number of cats.