Porter Anderson

An archive of Porter’s posts can be found HERE.

Porter Anderson (@Porter_Anderson) is a career journalist whose venues have included three of Time Warner’s CNN networks, the Village Voice, Thought Catalog, the Bookseller, Publishing Perspectives, the Dallas Times Herald, Dallas Observer, D Magazine, the Tampa Tribune, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, and other media.

You can follow his latest writings most easily using this feed in your reader.

As Associate Editor curating TheFutureBook.net — the world community for digital development in publishing — Anderson works closely with his London-based colleagues at Nigel Roby’s The Bookseller to bring together myriad voices of the industry in #FutureChat live discussions on Twitter and to present a steady sequence of voices from the many parts of publishing’s workforce.

#FutureChat is open to all each Friday at 4 p.m. London time, 11 a.m. New York time, 8 a.m. Los Angeles, 5 p.m. Berlin, 3 p.m. GMT.

Anderson’s Porter Anderson Meets column appears in the The Bookseller magazine in London on Fridays and on TheBookseller.com. It’s based on a live Twitter newsmaker interview conducted on Mondays and readers are welcome to come along for it, using the hashtag #PorterMeets at 4 p.m. London time, 11 a.m. New York, 3 p.m. GMT.

Anderson is also followed for his “Writing on the Ether” columns — which were originally created for JaneFriedman.com — at ThoughtCatalog.com in New York. Thought Catalog is consistently ranked among the biggest 60 or 70 Web sites in the world for unique users, and a specific feed for Anderson’s columns there is available at this link for your reader.

In the autumn 2014, Anderson has programmed the Master Class series of the all-new Business Club offering at Frankfurt Book Fair’s Halle 4, engaging world-class speakers to bring their best observations to bear on such key-interest topics as subscriptions in the book world (with Len Vlahos, Executive Director of the Book Industry Study Group, BISG), and marketing’s reachiest potential in a digital world. He’ll also be working at Frankfurt with Authoright, which is producing a special afternoon of programming for authors at BuchMesse.

In the spring of 2014, he programmed and led the BookExpo America uPublishU Author Hub, which for the first time placed a working center for entrepreneurial authors on the floor of BEA, itself. There’s more about this signal development at #BEA14 in this edition of Writing on the Ether at JaneFriedman.com.

Anderson’s work in newspapers, magazines, network television, and online network news have included the roles of critic, reporter, editor, managing editor, news anchor, content coordinator and senior producer.

Anderson gave a keynote address to The Next Chapter conference in Stockholm in May at the invitation of Publit’s Jonas Lennermo, and led a special onstage live interview with Anna Rafferty, former Penguin Digital Director there.

He will give the keynote in October at the Novelists Inc. conference on the Gulf Coast of Florida.

As a speaker, he has appeared with London Author Fair, The FutureBook Conference in London, Writer’s Digest Conference West in Los Angeles, Writer’s Digest Conference East in New York, Writer’s Digest Annual Conference in New York, Digital Book World in New York, O’Reilly Media Tools of Change’s specially prepared Author (R)evolution Day in New York, the PubSmart Conference in Charleston, South Carolina (April 2014), Boston’s the Muse and the Marketplace (Grub Street) in May, and Berlin’s Publisher’s Forum from Klopotek.

In many cases, Anderson’s presentations at conferences are live onstage interviews with newsmakers. These have included Hugh Howey, Emily St. John Mandel, Shanna Swendson, and Josh Malerman.

His Public Presentation for Authors boot camp was debuted in April 2013 at Writer’s Digest Conference East and repeated at Writer’s Digest Conference West. The event, running three hours, brings participants up to the microphone with their own text to read and gain immediate feedback and coaching. Covering not only live-event presentation (readings) but also television, radio, and online presence, the course offers professional training to newcomers to the literary field whose experience of public appearance and performance may be limited.

Anderson is regularly flown to publishing conferences and trade shows by organizers who hire him to “live-tweet” sessions of their events in a format he developed at CNN, taking each session from its beginning to end with fully explicated quotes from panelists and a comprehensive delivery of the discussion’s arc. This provides a chance for public engagement — both by event attendees and by others around the world — in a real-time format of cogent interaction and global visibility for the event.

A Fellow with the National Critics Institute, Anderson has professionally reviewed books, theater, dance, music, and visual arts for several mainstream media for three decades. Most recently his reviews of literary fiction were read at the Reader Unboxed site.

Anderson accepted a United Nations P5 diplomatic posting (with laissez-passer) to Rome as Creative Advisor and Multi-Media Manager to the UN’s World Food Programme. And he was Creative Consultant and Executive Producer to INDEX: Design to Improve Life, the Danish government’s awards program for international humanitarian design in Copenhagen under the royal patronage of HRH Frederik, Prince of Denmark.

Prior to becoming a journalist, Anderson worked as an Equity actor and as an account executive with Siegerman Associates, Inc., in public relations and advertising. His play script, Bernard Shaw: Weeding the Garden, was based on the religious writings of George Bernard Shaw. It was entered into the permanent Shaw Archives by Dan Laurence. Anderson was granted a limited-time performance license for the piece by the Shaw Estate via the Society of Authors in London.

Anderson holds a BA (William and Mary), an MA (University of Michigan), and an MFA (Florida State University Asolo Conservatory). He has done special readings in the psychology of the arts at the University of Bath, England.

In his 2011 Atlantic Center for the Arts (ACA) residency, Anderson worked with Master Artist and novelist Victoria Redel of Sarah Lawrence College.

He is a member of the American Men’s Studies Association, the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, the American Theatre Critics Association (former executive committee member) and the International Association of Theatre Critics (former vice president).

Anderson is a native of Charleston, South Carolina, and now is based in Tampa, on the Gulf Coast of Florida. He is a longtime supporter of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

As part of his interest in the potential impact of serious music and writing on each other, he has made the first challenge grant to listeners of Q2 Music, the 24/7 live-streaming contemporary classical Internet service of New York Public Radio flagship WNYC/WQXR.