Immediately before joining THR, Doherty was Manager-Online Public Relations for American and a member of the AA Product & Revenue Communications team, responsible for ensuring appropriate media coverage for several corporate departments, including Food & Beverage.

Before moving into the online PR position, Doherty's work focused on the use of intranets, extranets and other electronic communications, but his wide range of experience has continued to include print and interpersonal communications as well.

Doherty has written several book chapters regarding writing style, particularly for the Web, for various publishing houses including Addison, Wesley, Longman and Hampton Press. He was involved in development of some of the earliest successful efforts at using the Web as a communications tool in both academic and corporate environments.

As founding Editor and Publisher of Kairos: A Journal for Teachers of Writing in Webbed Environments, Doherty developed the first peer-reviewed Web-only academic journal in the field of English studies. In the process, he recruited and trained an internationally based editorial staff and board in the evaluation of Web-based materials using synchronous and asynchronous writing environments.

Kairos has been recognized by numerous publications, including The Chronicle of Higher Education, as a leading example of use of the Web in academia. In their popular 1997 college textbook Writing the Information Superhighway, William Condon and Wayne Butler labeled Kairos "extraordinarily hip and helpful." Kairos' design was used as the basis for Jason Cranford Teague's 1997 book How to Program HTML Frames: Interface Design and JavaScript.

Before founding Kairos, Doherty served as Managing Editor of one of the Web's first monthly publications, Computer-Mediated Communication Magazine, one of the early Web's most popular periodicals until it ceased publication in 1998. Doherty recruited and trained a locally based staff in the New York state capital district and co-edited the magazine's most widely read effort, a January 1995 "prognostications" special issue. With nine contributions, Doherty was also one of the most frequently published authors in the magazine's five-year run.

Before joining American Airlines, Doherty worked as the first Internet Editor at the Dallas Convention & Visitors Bureau (DCVB), where from 1997-2000 he developed electronic communications strategies for attracting visitors to Dallas, consistently a "Top 5" domestic convention destination. Highlights of his time at the DCVB included managing the development of the touchscreen kiosk project for the new downtown visitors center, designing the Bureau's first electronic media kit, and overseeing efforts to present its Web site in multiple languages. Doherty was also a contributing writer and editor to the many print brochures and guides published by the DCVB.

In September of 2000, Doherty returned to print full time as editor of Flagship News, the monthly employee newspaper of American Airlines. By early 2001, he had been promoted to managing editor for all employee publications, both print and electronic, and supervised a team of ten.

A one-year special assignment to the IT department to coordinate and manage migration of content from print and from previous online publications for the launch of the new employee portal Jetnet began in March 2001.

Subsequent staff re-organizations following the events of September 11 and ensuing corporate decisions to further develop online outlets extended the re-assignment to ITS to more than two years, first as managing editor for Jetnet, then as chief copywriter for online employee publications. In those positions, he was responsible for tracking story selection and placement, overseeing the development and implementation of a systemwide style guide, and coordinating the AMR Publishing Board, a collection of more than 300 editors and Webmasters.

Most of those responsibilities accompanied Doherty on his return to Corporate Communications in May of 2003, where he again assumed the role of Managing Editor - Employee Publications. Moving the focus of the employee communications team from a product-centered publications approach to a more strategic, storyline-based approach became the focus of the team, including a reconstituted Publishing Board, now made up of about 60 employee communications professionals from every workgroup across the system and known as the Front-Line Communicators (FLC). Under Doherty's direction, the FLC met weekly and communicated daily to coordinate overall corporate messaging.

While in academia, Doherty demonstrated an innovative and forward-thinking approach to curriculum design and training. He developed and taught one of the first "Writing to the Web" courses ever offered at the collegiate level; his 1996 effort eventually led to implementation of a regular course offering by the Communications department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, NY. The class is now a required credit toward RPI's burgeoning "Electronic Media, Arts and Communications" (EMAC) major. Doherty also developed and taught RPI's first primarily Web-based Technical & Professional Writing courses in 1996 and 1997.

Before his time at RPI, Doherty developed and taught the first writing course at Bowling Green State University (BGSU) to focus on use of Internet technologies, and also served as a writing program administrator, training and evaluating new instructors. He has taught every level of college composition, technical and business writing, several literature classes, and a graduate seminar on how to teach writing using online tools.

While an undergraduate at BGSU, Doherty was editor of the long-time campus magazine, Miscellany, which won several regional awards for both design and content from the Society for Professional Journalists. He graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in English, and later received an M.A. in English, also from Bowling Green, and an M.S. in Rhetoric & Technical Communication from RPI.

In 1997, Doherty and his spouse Sandye Thompson [www.sandyethompson.com] founded the independent communications consulting group HappyDog Communications. The two have given workshops and presentations in more than a dozen states and have provided Web development and e-mail newsletter publishing expertise to numerous clients. Thompson is an accredited full-time freelance medical editor and an accomplished Web developer.

Doherty's writing, dating back to the mid-1980s, has produced hundreds of bylines for numerous publications, including several years as a fantasy baseball columnist for ESPN.com. He is currently also Co-Managing Editor and Media Relations Manager for Batter's Box Interactive Magazine [www.battersbox.ca], a popular Canadian baseball Web site.

Doherty and Thompson have been active volunteers in animal causes including the Dallas Dog Park and Feral Friends, the latter for whom Doherty performed volunteer media relations work. Most appreciative of these efforts are adopted kitty Bridget and mutt Maddie.