Writing / Media Services

Writing / Editing / Researching

The dissemination of ideas and information these days is crucial for any individual, business or organization. How you present yourself and your work to the world in the age of the internet, Facebook, Twitter, and mobile phones is now more important than ever because you are reaching a global audience in ways few have ever been able to do so before. With an unprecedented reach, your presentation of yourself, your services, and what you have to say is more important than ever in defining who you are and what you do. And because of all of the information the internet has made available to mass audiences, any research conducted or reports or findings presented will be expected to be more thorough and engaging than the same material would have been even just a few years ago. But with so much information out there, how will you find what you need? What sources can you trust? How should you tailor your outreach to different audiences, which themselves change rapidly?

​Brian is here to help you do all this, answer all these questions, and more. He has been engaging in research projects for nearly two decades and has authored papers and articles on topics as diverse as Chinese women in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, smallpox as a bioterrorist weapon and the policy response, America’s post-Civil War Reconstruction as a failed peace operation, foreign policy lessons the ancient Roman Republic can provide policymakers today, American health care policy, redistricting as the cause of the 2013 U.S. Government shutdown, and a field evaluation of the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL), among many, many other topics. He engaged in research as an intern for then-Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr., engaged in research as a student and an independent scholar, and, most recently, engaged in research for Edelman Berland, the research division of Edelman, the world's largest public relations firm, and is currently engaging in research as a freelancer. In fact, there are few topics about which Brian can’t research or write competently. Even if they are topics new to Brian, you can be assured that he will very likely be able to find good, quality sources and that he will be a serious student of whatever new topic comes his way, producing content that does far more than just scratch the surface. His writing even going back to high school can be characterized as more thorough, thought-provoking, and well-researched than that of most of his peers. And not only can Brian easily come up with original content for you and you organization, he is also quite skilled at editing existing content, having edited many papers going back to his college days and now as a professional freelancer. Even if you are a non-English speaker or are not fluent in English, and need perfect English content to reach a global audience, or if you need someone to proofread your existing English content, Brian is here for you.

So Brian can write for you—website content, scholarly academic reports, articles, you name it—and he can edit and research at a very high level, too. His ratings as a freelancer on Upwork for writing, editing, and researching are nearly perfect across dozens of projects, and he is in the top 1% for profile views on LinkedIn out of over 9,000 oDesk contractors on LinkedIn, so if you want that exceptional quality of work for you and your organization, reach out to Brian today.

Journalism/Reporting/Media Analysis

​When it comes to the news, a reader is now encountering a breadth and a set of challenges unprecedented in human history. The internet has seen an explosion of new news sources, but the increase in number of sources has not necessarily led to an increase in the quality of journalism and reporting. Even biased sources, though, can be valuable, in so far as they reveal the biases of those backing them. But how are you supposed to know what sources are biased, how they are biased, and to what degree? What are the most objective sources available, and how can you find them? How can you even define and identify bias? What sources are best for your and your organization’s needs?

​Brian can answer these questions for you. Years of research at the undergraduate and graduate level, as well as research conducted on his own, have helped Brian to develop a very keen and discerning eye when it comes to selecting sources. He can identify bias, will do background research on those writing and backing the sources, and will make sure to be able to explain all this to you in a way you can clearly understand and apply to your work and life.

​Furthermore, Brian has examined or experienced how media interfaces with everything from itself, to active United Nations peacekeeping operations, to elected politician’s offices, to major corporations and other entities, and how all these interface back to the media and with each other. Especially in his studies and from his time at Edelman Berland, the research division of Edelman, the world’s largest public relations firm, Brian has come to appreciate and understand the media’s unique role in politics, society, policy, war, and culture, and how all shape the media in return. Edelman’s Media Cloverleaf in particular helps to explain the relationship between the four different kinds of media: traditional, hybrid, social, and owned. Such knowledge can be especially helpful to professionals seeking to engage the media and to understanding how it engages them back in return.

Brian has also had several hundred of his own articles published, beginning when he wrote for one of his college's newspapers, including writing the front-page story on the 9/11 attacks the day after they had occurred, and he recently had a large number of articles published on a wide variety of topics across multiple media outlets, some receiving national attention. So apart from analyzing the news media, he has also been a member of it. When writing for PolicyMic, Brian quickly rose to the top of the list for most shared, most commented, and most liked articles when PolicyMic had a system which displayed such metrics to its readers. Even when readers could not keep tracks of these statistics anymore, Brian’s articles received many thousands of shares and reads, one article alone about gun policy garnering well over 13,000 unique reads and challenging the NRA so strongly that the NRA felt a need to respond. Brian’s topics covered range from historical comparisons, a five-part series exploring international intervention options in Syria, American politics, the NSA, and even a review of Showtime’s Dexter series finale.

Whether writing articles as a journalist or filtering and analyzing the media, Brian can be a great asset to you and your organization while you attempt to cover the stories of the world or engage and navigate today’s exploding and complicated media landscape.