Penelope Trunk

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Penelope Trunk (legal name Adrienne GreenHeart, born Adrienne Roston in 1966) is an American blogger. Her blogs have appeared in the Boston Globe and, until December 2007, on Yahoo Finance. "Yahoo Finance" did not renew her contract. Penelope claims her blog has appeared in more than 200 publications. She is the author of Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success (Warner, May 2007). She is also the author of the blog Brazen Careerist.

Biography

Trunk was born Adrienne Roston in Massachusetts. She attended New Trier High School while living in Wilmette, Illinois. She was awarded a Ford Foundation fellowship and earned a BA in history from Brandeis University in 1990. In 1993, she played in six tournaments that were sponsored by the (now defunt) Women’s Professional Beach Volleyball tour. Her career record was 3 and 12.

From 1993 to 1995, Trunk attended Boston University and took creative writing classes. Although never receiving a degree, Trunk wrote one of the first hypertext novels under the name Adrienne Eisen. (According to her blog, she also used the name Adrienne GreenHeart at or around this time.) She received the New Media Invision award, and was made a member of the Electronic Literature Organization.

Career

Trunk's business experience came from her work at early Internet businesses including one of the first online ordering systems at Ingram Micro, and one of the first subscription software businesses at CyberMedia. Trunk began writing professionally in 1999 at eCompany magazine about her own life as an executive. She has been a careers columnist at Business 2.0 magazine, Bankrate.com and Yahoo! Finance. She has been a columnist at the Boston Globe, and her syndicated column has appeared in more than 200 publications worldwide. Content for her column is often drawn from her blog. Trunk’s decisions about her own career have been written about in Time and The Guardian. An article was written about her in Madison Magazine, a regional publication in Madison, Wisconsin, where Trunk has lived since 2007.

Trunk also created content for several other websites. Yahoo had licensed some of her content, but terminated her contract in December, 2007. Trunk writes in her blog: "It turns out that financial content gets a higher CPM (advertising rate) than career content. So while my column has a lot of traffic, Yahoo sells my career column to advertisers as part of the Yahoo Finance package, and I bring down the CPM of the whole package.

Trunk's book is titled Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success (Warner, May 2007).

In early 2008, Trunk and two Generation Y bloggers founded her third start-up, with Trunk as CEO, by turning the Brazen Careerist brand into a company. Brazen Careerist brings together several hundred Generation Y bloggers to write on subjects ranging from career advice to politics. The Brazen Careerist business model is centered on providing a way for companies to solve their Gen Y recruiting problems by branding themselves as employers to Gen Y thought leaders.

This website was consulted the 23^rd Nov. 2008.

Academic year 2008/2009

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Universitat de València Press