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TheBuzz
Erika Engle
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Keen moves to public relations, Bickson voted Hotelier of the World
Former TV anchor, reporter and weathercaster Angela Keen left the working world in late September, thinking she would rejoin it in November. She has, but in a different role.
Keen joined the Limtiaco Co. public relations agency last week as a senior account executive.
She will strategize editorial direction, advise and provide oversight on media relations including media training, according to the company.
That means she'll still be getting stories out there -- but she won't be writing them, she'll be pitching them.
The gig "kind of snagged me," she said. She had many offers "and it was something I really had to think long and hard about."
"I love to see people succeed and I think in this business of public relations and marketing, there's a great opportunity to do that. I'm thinking that's where it fits in for me, being able to empower them so they can be more successful."
Working mornings in broadcasting as Keen did, is brutal. Ask anyone who does it or has done it. (Your columnist has.)
Keen's schedule had people from her 12-year-old stepdaughter to her physician urging her to change shifts.
She left the job instead, and now she doesn't have to go to bed at the same time as a preschooler and needn't arise at oh-dark-thirty every day.
Luminary local boy
Hawaii-born-and-bred Raymond Bickson is on the cover of Hotels magazine as its 2007 Corporate Hotelier of the World. He's pictured with Natale Rusconi, 2007 Independent Hotelier of the World. Both were selected by some of the magazine's more than 62,000 readers worldwide.
The feature story says Bickson grew up surfing in Hawaii. Now 51, he probably doesn't do a lot of that, based as he is in India where he serves as managing director and chief executive officer of Taj Hotels Resorts and Palaces.
Typing "Bickson" into the Star-Bulletin online search field will net you more than 120 newspaper-column-inches of ink on the kamaaina family. Given their active social lives, their names mostly appear under the bylines of Ben Wood and the late Dave Donnelly.
Considering that patriarch Irwin "Bick" Bickson established Budget Rent A Car in Hawaii in the early 1960s and was a pioneering mover and shaker in isle tourism, much more history is out there.
But the magazine honor is about now and Bick's son is clearly blazing his own trail in the global hospitality industry.
As for the future, he will appear on next year's previous winners list, along with Patricia Tam of Halekulani in 1999 and the late Christopher Hemmeter in 1989, as well as Adrian Zecha, a Bickson mentor, in 2001.
Erika Engle is a reporter with the Star-Bulletin. Call 529-4747, fax 529-4750 or write to Erika Engle, Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 500 Ala Moana Blvd., No. 7-210, Honolulu, HI 96813. She can also be reached at:
eengle@starbulletin.com