By Dave Phillips

Career Highlights

A few of my major accomplishments, most rewarding projects and favorite moments at work.

Led a complete website redesign project, all the way from the Requests For Proposals (RFP) process through completion. We selected Teal Media to be our web vendor and I worked alongside them to accomplish the goals laid out by a cross-functional internal team that I also led. The result is a visually-engaging site with concise text, ensuring that our message gets through without bogging the reader down with too much information. This project occurred simultaneously with a brand redesign led by United Way Worldwide.
Revamped, wrote, built and edited a weekly internal staff newsletter. I now oversee this work and still edit it every Friday morning. We use Microsoft Sway to produce this piece, accepting and compiling submissions from staff members.
Five years of management experience, leading a small team in writing, building and sending mass emails and text messages as well as maintaining our website.
Earned a Telly Award for work on a story about Access For All, a skilled trades program.

My beat was primarily cops and courts for the daily newspaper with a circulation of about 60,000 at that time, based in Pontiac.
My reporting earned more than a dozen awards from multiple media organizations over my six years at the paper.
I covered several major police stories and court cases. Here are a few:
- An oncologist who was sentenced to 45 years in prison for mistreating patients. He was accused of providing treatment that patients did not need or would not benefit from as part of a Medicare scam.
- A grandmother who was sentenced to 20 to 40 years in prison on a second degree murder conviction in the shooting death of her grandson.
- A man who pleaded guilty to murdering his father and severely injuring his mother and brother in a baseball bat attack.
As a longtime racing enthusiast, my favorite story I covered at The Oakland Press was on the Penske Dream Cruise. In the days leading up to the Woodward Dream Cruise, Roger Penske gathered the pace cars from all of his Indianapolis 500 victories as team owner. He brought in drivers from NASCAR and Indy Car to drive them up and down Woodward, complete with a police escort.
I appeared on various television news programs as an expert discussing court cases, including the Jane Velez Mitchell show on HLN, a crime documentary show on Oxygen, “Tokudane!” in Japan and more.

My friends and I launched a volunteer-led, low-power FM radio station housed in The Rust Belt Market in Ferndale. We went live in November 2017.
We broadcast at 100.7 FM in and around Ferndale and stream across the globe at FerndaleRadio.com/stream
The Metro Times put together a nice article about our station.