David G. Zeiler
Staff cryptocurrency expert at Money Morning, a financial news website. OG: Mined Bitcoin in 2011. Tech junkie. Appleholic. Political malcontent.
David G. Zeiler, writer, editor, publications designer, Apple, Inc. expert and political curmudgeon.
He is a native of Baltimore and, like so many of his fellow Baltimoreans, never left. He went to Catholic schools all the way through: St. Matthew School on Loch Raven Blvd. (now Cardinal Shehan School), Loyola Blakefield in Towson, and Loyola College in Maryland (now Loyola University), where he majored in English/Mass Communications.
After graduating from Loyola College (yes, I persist in using the former name in protest), David Zeiler landed his first real journalism job - at The Catholic Review, the weekly newspaper of the Archdiocese of Baltimore.
There David Zeiler was asked to do a weekly rock column. Yes, a rock column. In The Catholic Review. Back then Dave Zeiler was a young whippersnapper who spent a lot of time listening to rock music and going to see local band, like The Ravyns, play in clubs.
In those early days at The Catholic Review, David Zeiler also became part of a short-lived local rock magazine called The Choice, where he served as an Associate Editor. At The Choice, Dave Zeiler interviewed such alternative rock talents as Suzanne Vega, the Replacements, the Ramones, The Fleshtones, and The Damned.
At The Catholic Review, David Zeiler also did page design and helped supervise the paste-up production process at The Capital in Annapolis. Eventually he got promoted to News Editor, which meant more story editing, less story writing, and all of the page design duties. Oh, and he kept on doing the rock column. It was popular with the young folks, and featured a logo with Dave Zeiler's picture!
After six years, however, the Catholic news cycle started to get repetitive. So when David Zeiler saw a job opening at The Sun for a copy editor/page designer, he immediately applied.
David Zeiler was asked to come in to The Sun's Calvert Street offices on a Saturday to take a copy editing test. He must have done well, because the next week he was offered a job!
Working at The Sun was a pretty big deal for Dave Zeiler, who as a native Baltimorean grew up reading both the morning Sun as well as The Evening Sun every day. This wasn't just a hometown newspaper, it was a venerable news institution that had a respected Washington bureau, numerous foreign bureaus, and had won Pultizer Prizes.
David Zeiler started out designing pages and copy editing for the county editions, known in-house as the zoned editions. After about three years, the publisher of The Sun at the time decided to merge the zones with the morning Sun editorial operations.
At that point, David Zeiler became a full-time page designer. Shortly afterward, the regular designer for the Business section asked for a switch, and Dave Zeiler was asked to take on the job. It was a natural fit, like when Baltimore Orioles manager Earl Weaver moved Cal Ripken to shortstop from third base.
Dave Zeiler soon became known throughout the Sun newsroom as the "biz guy." It was a role he relished, as his technical expertise was soon needed to create templates of the stock tables and other business agate, which back then consumed about half of the business pages. David Zeiler remained a proud steward of the Business section until it ceased to exist as a separate section in 2008. (It was folded into a comprehensive news section along with the Metro section as part of a series of severe cost-cutting measures.)
Meanwhile, David Zeiler never quite left behind his roots as a writer. By the mid-1990s, The Sun had launched a weekly tech section called Plugged In, and editor Mike Himowitz quickly enlisted Dave Zeiler to write about the Mac and oter Apple-related news. It was the beginning of an association with tech news that continues to the present day...
