[last updated September 10, 2025]
Official Bio
David Churbuck is a writer, maritime historian, and crisis communications consultant.
Previously in his career, he was a member of the firm of Sitrick And Company where he led the technology practice and was managing director of its Boston office.
Mr. Churbuck founded Forbes.com in 1995 and was the site’s editor -in-chief during the 1998 New Republic fraud scandal chronicled in the film Shattered Glass. Before launching Forbes.com he was Forbes’ senior technology editor, winning national awards for his cover story about digital forgery, and the first national coverage of the Internet. In 2000 he joined McKinsey & Company as the management consulting firm’s first Chief Content Officer.
Mr. Churbuck was VP of Global Digital Marketing at Lenovo from 2005 through 2010, winning awards for his athlete blogging campaign – Voice of the Summer Games — during the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics.
He was a founding partner of Eastman Advisors, a digital strategy firm based in New York City that advised celebrity clients in the entertainment, art, and luxury goods markets on their ecommerce, social media, and digital marketing strategies.
Prior to joining Sitrick and Company, he was the VP of Corporate Marketing at Acquia, a Boston-based SAAS provider of open source content management solutions to Global 2000 clients. At Acquia he was responsible for public relations, crisis communications, brand management, executive communications and thought leadership.
A native of Cape Cod, Mr. Churbuck graduated from Yale University with a BA in American History. A competitive rower, he is the author of The Book of Rowing. His writing has earned awards from the National Association of Science Writers, the Computer Press Associations, among others.
He is presently completing a book about the shipwreck, survival, and rescue of the crew of the Nantucket whaling ship Phoenix in Russia’s Sea of Okhotsk in 1858. He is represented by John Rudolph at Dystel, Goderich & Bourret.
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My version
There’s got to be at least six versions of my biography lying around between Linked.in, the corporate about us pages, old conference speaker agendas, a wikipedia entry, and of course my actual resume which I never can find when I need it. I’ve been blogging here and elsewhere for about 24 years (since 2001). This is my five-minute autobiography, more of a long-winded story than a draft of my obituary.
Name
Churbuck is a misspelling of Chubbuck. My third great-grandfather, Thomas Swift Chubbuck lived in Wareham, Massachusetts and had a lot of children, most of whom died in childhood. The two sons who survived to a ripe old age had different last names. Thomas Augustus Chubbuck was born a Chubbuck and died a Chubbuck in 1924. His brother Henry Swift Chubbuck was born a Chubbuck but died a Churbuck. This may be why I commit egregious typos when writing this blog, generally omitting words such as “if” “and” “or” “but.”
I’m married to Daphne Fullerton Churbuck, founder of the interior design firm: Graham Eliot Interior Design, and we have three children — Eliot, Alexandra “B” and Fisher. Daphne and I live on Cape Cod in my great-great-grandfather’s house near the center of a small village in the town of Barnstable. I share my middle name with that ancestor, Thomas Chatfield, and his reminiscences can be found on this site under the main menu.
Ancestors
The Handys, Chatfields and Churbucks were whalers, sailors, shipwrights, oat builders and wood workers in Cotuit. I was the first generation to only spend summers there. My maternal grandfather Kenneth “Mac” McKiniry taught high school in Andover, MA and Exeter, NH, and was a great football and basketball coach at Punchard High. He played professional football for the Detroit Lions in the 1930s.
I grew up north of Boston in Georgetown and Andover, with a short preface in Houston in the early 1960s after my dad graduated from Harvard Business School. I spent my summers shuttling between my grandparent’s places in Rye Beach, NH (where he was the harbormaster) and the Cape. Dad passed away in 1980 in a car accident on the Cape, but mom sti spends summers in Cotuit along with my siblings, Thomas, Julie and Henry.
School
I went to public school in Georgetown, private school at the Pike School in Andover, Mass.; prep school as a day student at the Brooks School in North Andover, Mass. (class of 1976), and college at Yale (1980) where I studied American History and English Lit, and graduated as a Scholar of the House. Over the course of my senior year I wrote an unpublished novel “Parallel Roundings” which deserves to remain unpublished.
In college I led a dissolute existence, but rowed on the Heavyweight Crew team, and paid my tuition by delivering the New York Times, and beer kegs for a local liquor store. I learned how to handset type as a printer’s devil under Dale Roylance of the Sterling Library’s Bibliographic Press.
I arrived in New Haven vaguely wanting to become a surgeon, was quickly disabused of that notion, and graduated in 1980 with no clue of what I wanted to do next other than bury my father and get on with the business of figuring out the future. The summer after graduation I worked as an intern for the Cape Cod Times, where I “covered the waterfront” and caught the reporting bug. I was inordinately proud of being listed as a “notable alumni” on the Cape Cod Time’s wikipedia page.
20s
After college I delivered sailboats, then ended up in California where I tended bar in San Francisco at the Balboa Cafe and learned the true craft of the cocktail from Jack Slick. I also, met my wife, fell in love, and proposed to her on bended knee.
Engaged, we returned to New England where I managed to get hired as a cub reporter at the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune, and for the next few years covered the border town of Salem, NH, the New Hampshire presidential primaries in 1984 (meeting my political hero George McGovern on his comeback tour), car crashes, landfill fires, ribbon cuttings, and eventually wound up on Beacon Hill as the paper’s Statehouse Bureau Chief. I loved politics, became a big fan of the late Paul Tsongas and Barney Frank — truly decent politicians — and at night tended bar at Daisy Buchanan’s the old Back Bay Boston sports bar frequented by the high and mighty of Boston sports.
In 1984 I left political reporting and daily journalism to join PC Week, a weekly trade newspaper covering the IBM personal computer market. For four years I had a front row seat at the birth of that amazing “revolution,” hung out with true legends, and realized I had an affinity for writing about technology.
30s: The Forbes years
I wrote my one and only book (under my own name, I’ve ghost-written others), The Book of Rowing, which was published by Overlook Press in 1988. That same year I saw Forbes Magazine was launching a special section devoted to computers and communications, so I wrote a letter to Steve Forbes, and was asked to write a “try-out” story. They liked it, published it. And it even won an award even though it was written under a pen name. Forbes hired me on as an associate editor and the magazine’s New England Bureau chief. I won a few big awards of my work — thanks to the brilliant editing of Bill Baldwin and Jim Michaels — and still get fan mail for my cover story on how I forged my paycheck with simple desktop publishing tools, a story that introduced me to Frank Abagnale of Catch Me If You Can fame.
In 1994 I wrote a big story about the coming commercialization of the government-funded Internet and saw the future of the media when Lotus founder Mitch Kapor showed me his new connection to that world in his Cambridge office. So I sat down, wrote a letter to the Forbes family, told them I had seen the future and it’s name was “HTML” — and then in a burst of naive passion, learned that HTML and wrote the first prototype of Forbes.com
I ran Forbes.com from 1995 to 2000 and had the time of my life. When I was 40 we broke the Stephen Glass plagiarism scandal that went on to be the inspiration for the film “Shattered Glass.” I was omitted from that story for ….let’s say “political reasons” but it was a great piece of journalism I’m proud of. We invented a lot of things at Forbes.com, were constantly trying stuff that usually didn’t work, but sometimes did. It was clear by 2000, when the first wave of dot.com mania was at its peak and about to burst, that I needed to move on. Thirteen years at Forbes could have turned into 30, and something inside me told me I had just unleashed a monster that was going to eventually eat its parent. When Stewart Pinkerton wrote his account of Forbes The Fall of the House of Forbes I was flattered and saddened to be featured in a chapter entitled “The Death Star.” Yes, Stewart described me as a “tall, ruggedly handsome man” (a flattery and conceit I take great glee in sharing with my skeptical wife), but I also realize that being the founder of that thing also unleashed a monster that gave the world the “slideshow” of the world’s top nude beaches and degenerated into a “thought leadership” platform for any content marketer who covets the tag “Forbes Contributor” on their resume.
And no, don’t ask me about the Cue Cat.
40s: McKinsey and Switzerland
After Forbes I entered my Wilderness Years. First stop: McKinsey & Company and an ill-fated dot.com mania venture called TomorrowLab which was shuttered three months after I arrived, only to find myself reassigned to a project in the firm’s New York office rebuilding its knowledge management system. I watched the World Trade Center collapse from my office at McKinsey, and four sad months later took a job in Zurich with a startup called 21i.net which was a sort-of social network, online private banking platform founded by a fascinating man from Lichtenstein.
That really continued the long-distance commuting lifestyle that began in 1994 at Forbes.com when I lived in New York during the week and flew home to Cotuit on the weekends. Zurich was a good experience, gave me a taste for international work, but 21i.net fell victim to the hyperbole of the dot.com era and in 2004 I was on the beach freelancing and ghostwriting and thinking of getting back into media.
I took a gig at IDG — the publisher of Computerworld and CIO Magazine that was run by the legendary Pat McGovern — and led their transition from online to print for eight brief months before the McKinsey mafia found me and recommended me to the chief marketing officer of a new computer company — Lenovo — formed by the acquisition of IBM’s PC business by the Chinese tech powerhouse Legend.
50s: Lenovo and marketing
I knew zero about marketing (and still know very little), but that CMO, Deepak Advani wanted me and so I began commuting to Raleigh and Beijing, building Lenovo’s digital marketing operation in support of its ecommerce efforts on Lenovo.com. The high points of that detour in a weird career was being given the responsibility to support Lenovo’s sponsorship of the 2008 Olympic Games with a totally amazing athlete blogging program that actually worked against all naysaying predictions. The recession of 2008 hit Lenovo’s global marketing team hard, but I survived and went on to be part of a team that built a sexy little device called the Skylight which was — for lack of a better word — a Cloud PC and went on to win all kinds of best in show awards at the 2010 CES.
I got the ax eventually from Lenovo when a new CMO came aboard. I was itchy to do something else, tired of a life spent bullshitting about web analytics and social media marketing and went back to freelancing for a while for McKinsey and some corporate clients.
Art and Entertainment to Commercial Open Source and SaaS
In 2011, after considering a new career in public relations, I joined up with two very smart guys in NYC and started Eastman Advisors out of a townhouse on W. 54th Street behind the Museum of Modern Art. We did some fun projects guiding the digital strategies for Christie’s the art auction house, a big television entertainment legend, a very very famous musician and some other cool names in art, music and luxury goods.
In 2014 I was approached by a Boston-area startup, Acquia, to do some freelance writing about the confluence of content and commerce, and in the summer of 2014 joined them fulltime as the VP of Corporate Marketing — running public relations, content marketing, web operations, social media, brand marketing and all the other “softer” aspects of marketing which I enjoy. I am really into the concept of “developer relations” these days — as developer marketing is a definite oxymoron; and take great satisfaction from being part of a new company that is the well-spring of innovation like some of the legends I had witnessed over the last 30 years, amazing places that at the time I just knew would become huge successes such as Microsoft in 1984, Intel, Broadcom, Google when Sergey and Larry came to Forbes.com and talked to Om Malik and me in 1996.
“The Ray Donovan Phase”
I got axed from Acquia in March 2018, something I saw coming for months, and immediately made plans to launch my own consulting practice around crisis and strategic communications. As I did the post-employment networking thing I spoke to some close friends and colleagues about the challenges of bootstrapping an agency and one of them put me in touch with Seth Lubove, the former LA bureau chief of Forbes and a contemporary of mine at the magazine. Seth has been a partner at Sitrick And Company for four years and he encouraged me to send along a resume as Mike Sitrick the firm’s founder had an interest in building up his client roster among tech companies and a parallel desire to open a Boston office.
May 7, 2018 was my first day. The press release announcing my appointment can be found here.
In 2023 I parted ways with Sitrick and entered semi-retirement to write a book. That book is finished, I landed a new literary agent, and as of August 2025 I’m finishing the publisher proposal and hoping my agent finds a buyer.
Etc.
I’m 67 As old rowers like to say, “The older we get, the faster we were.” I have a sailboat in the harbor. I don’t try to kill myself exercising anymore because I realize now that trying to be fit the way I thought I needed to be by once riding a bicycle on Cape Cod roads or doing Crossfit were sure tickets to the emergency room. I was hit by a car in 2006 and it was a bad one. Concussion beyond belief. My retina detached. Then I got back on my feet and started Crossfit and popped my bicep and ended up having surgery and wearing a Frankenstein brace. Now I wake up very early some mornings and take a leisurely constitutional through the village in the dark, listening to the screech owls hooting in the woods, gazing at the constellations, and freaking out when some animal skulks across the pre-dawn streets in front of me.
I read like a fiend — everything from biographies of Churchill to Don DeLillo’s latest. I blog when I have cacoethes scribendi, binge-watch art films (favorite auteur is Bela Tarr) think the greatest album of all time is Astral Weeks, the greatest novel is Peter Mathiessen’s Killing Mister Watson (followed by Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge) feel entranced in front of anything by Rothko, prefer Cheez-its to Cheese Nips, and love being a grandfather.
That’s about all that you need to know about me. I overshare here on occasion but try not to post pictures of my food.
*Middle name to avoid confusion with the “other” David Churbuck