A 17-year cable vet, Jeff Baumgartner has never once been embarrassed that he owes his career and much of his happy post-college life to an industry that so many people love to hate.

Jeff got his start in cable in 1992 flacking for Jones Education Networks, an umbrella company that operated full-time education and technology programming networks that have since gone away or been absorbed by a bigger programmer.   He left in 1998 to sip a cup of coffee at what's now Starz Entertainment, where he wrote and developed trade advertising, and pretty much had no role or influence in that company's success.  But he learned a valuable lesson: marketing was not for him.

In 1998, Jeff finally got his big chance to do something with his journalism degree when he was named Denver Bureau Chief of CableFAX Daily, where he penned lots of implication leads, rarely wrote a story longer than 300 words, but learned a lot about cable technology along the way, and actually started to like the subject.

He got to flex his tech muscles in 2000 when he joined CED Magazine  as an associate editor, then later took over the tech beat at Multichannel News.  He later returned to CED, eventually rising to Editor in Chief, and ruled that pub with an iron fist. 

When his swelling ego reached a size that no longer allowed him to enter the front door there, the fine folks at Light Reading  took him down a notch in April 2007 to take over the day-to-day editorial needs of Cable Digital News.

Jeff has a B.A. in technical journalism/electronic reporting from Colorado State University.  He lives and works in Highlands Ranch, a sprawling suburb just south of Denver.