My BlogHer Profile: Cynthia Samuels

Cynthia Samuels has an extensive background online, on television and in print, with particular experience developing content for parents and families. In the nearly four years she spent with iVillage, the leading Internet site for women, her assignments included the design and supervision of the hugely popular Education Central, a sub-site of Parent Soup that was a soup-to-nuts parent’s toolkit on K-12 education, designed to support parents as advocates and supporters of their school-age kids. She also served as the iVillage partner for America Links Up, a major corporate Internet safety initiative for parents. She also served a long stint as iVillage's Washington editor.. She has also developed parent content for Jim Henson Interactive and served as Children’s Book Editor for both Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com. Her parent-oriented work spread to other media as well. She has also had a long and distinguished career as a broadcast journalist, as senior national editor of National Public Radio, political producer of NBC's Today Show where she worked for nine years (and was also the primary producer on issues relating to child care, education, learning disabilities and child development), and as the first executive producer of Channel One, a daily news broadcast seen in 12,000 U.S. high schools. She has published a children’s book It’s A Free Country, A Young Person’s Guide To Politics And Elections (Atheneum, 1988) and numerous children’s book reviews in the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post Book World. A creator of online content since 1994, Samuels is a partner in Cobblestone Associates, LLP and has worked with such clients as Universal New Media Group, Amazon.com, EXCITE, Barnes and Noble.com, Women.com, Jim Henson Interactive and the Global Interactive Information Awards. She lives in the Shepard Park neighborhood of Washington DC with her husband Richard Atkins and has two grown sons.