Media Training Consulting Team

  Greg Lefevre

After a decades long career as a national and international correspondent, Greg Lefevre forged an alliance with Rhonda Silva in 2000 to offer his services as a Media Training Consultant. Lefevre's award-winning work, includes a national Emmy Award and three Cable ACE awards for coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing, the Los Angeles Earthquake and the Alaska oil spill. He also won awards for his coverage of education, for a documentary on America's forests and for coverage of the fires at Yellowstone National Park and was given a special cable industry award for coverage of Operation Desert Storm.  Learn more about Greg Lefevre and media training »

Lefevre served as CNN San Francisco Correspondent, then Bureau Chief from 1983 to 2001. He supervised a staff of 28 covering news events in the Northwestern United States. In addition to managing coverage for the CNN News Group, he reported on breaking news events for CNN's TV, radio and Internet services. He reported on Politics, the Economy, the Silicon Valley, New Media and technology beats for CNN and for CBS-owned San Francisco television station KPIX-TV.

In a rich career as broadcast correspondent, Lefevre covered many important events, most recently the Ronald Reagan memorial observances. Greg chronicled the dot com boom and bust, fallout from the World Trade Center attack, the Microsoft trial, Apple Computer, the Western firestorms of 2000, El Niño flooding, the 81-day Montana Freemen standoff, the Unabomber arrest and trial, the TWA Flight 800 crash, the O.J. Simpson trial, the Nancy Kerrigan-Tonya Harding incident, eleven presidential campaigns, the U.S. forest policy conflicts, the Oakland Hills fires and earthquakes in San Francisco and Los Angeles. He has filed numerous reports on AIDS, covering its medical, societal, economic and political aspects. Also, he developed the CNN San Francisco Bureau's New Media beat, with extensive coverage of personal technology. Lefevre filed more than 70 on-the-scene reports from Alaska on the 1989 Valdez oil spill, more reports than any other network correspondent.

Lefevre served as Bureau Chief for CNN's coverage of the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, supervising a staff of 92. He won a national Emmy Award for coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing. He covered the Middle East in three tours, as Pentagon pool reporter during the Iran-Iraq war and twice during the Gulf War. He reported live during SCUD missile attacks in Israel and covered Kuwaiti and Palestinian refugees in Amman, Jordan.

Lefevre joined CNN in 1983 as a correspondent in the San Francisco Bureau and was promoted to bureau chief in 1989. He joined CNN from KSEE-TV in Fresno, Calif., where he was News Director. Lefevre's service at KSEE-TV was marked by a rapid rise in ratings for the NBC affiliate, the station's first computerized election coverage and by coverage of the first of a spate of California earthquakes, one that rocked and ravaged the farm community of Coalinga. Lefevre also reported for KDFW-TV in Dallas. In Dallas Lefevre was lead correspondent for the re-opening of the John F. Kennedy assassination investigation at Dealey Plaza. That story took Greg across the Southwest and to Washington, D.C. where a House committee staged days of hearings into the JFK and Martin Luther King, Jr. assassinations.

Lefevre is frequently called upon to speak on Media Relations, Crisis Management, Staff Development and Ethics. He served on the California Association of School Boards Crisis Planning and Response Task Force. He served on an American Bar Association committee on mass disaster response and on a Stanford University Law School symposium on ethics in wartime news coverage.

  Paul von Beroldingen

Paul von Beroldingen brings more than thirty years of successful case histories in public relations, marketing communications and media coaching to the Optimum team. With early roots in broadcast news and experience on both the agency and corporate client sides, he is skilled in strategic planning, issues management, media relations, litigation communications, speechwriting, media training and marketing presentations. Von Beroldingen has developed award-winning messages for international corporations, private companies, governmental agencies and nonprofits. His portfolio includes projects in health care, manufacturing, energy, technology, science, tourism and hospitality. He is recognized for special expertise in communications for the legal, financial services, land use and real estate sectors. His marketing communications strategy for the historic San Remo Hotel in San Francisco helped to position the North Beach inn as a popular option for tourists from around the world. At the same time, he preserved the hotel's reputation as a valuable institution when the owners challenged city laws restricting tourist occupancy in small hotels. His media coaching for the owners was pivotal in achieving balanced news coverage during hotly contested administrative hearings and 12 years of state and federal litigation that reached the United States Supreme Court (San Remo Hotel v. City and County of San Francisco).

Von Beroldingen counseled leaders of the San Francisco Hotel Association, preparing them for testimony before legislative committees and for news interviews concerning controversial zoning regulations. He provided media coaching for senior executives in the U.S. Western Region office of BNP Paribas, top French bank and a global financial services firm, and conducted marketing presentation training for Cord Blood Registry, a world leader in stem cell cord blood banking. During three years of statewide public relations projects for the California Society of Certified Public Accountants (CalCPA), he issued tax and financial planning updates to editors, and trained CPA specialists to become expert news interview sources on taxes, personal finance and the California economy.

Skilled in spotting stakeholder reactions and hot-button issues, he served on a team that assessed employee attitudes and internal communications during acquisition of Fast Search & Transfer and AltaVista by Overture, one of the largest Internet search companies. Before his consulting practice, he held management posts on the agency and client sides in San Francisco. As founder and principal of Bay City Public Relations, his client list included Chevron Chemical, Liquid Air, the National Energy Foundation, American Express, United Federal Savings, the Envelope Manufacturers Association of America, Ampex, Bay Area Child Health and Disability Prevention Programs and the law firm of Hanson Bridgett Marcus & Vlahos. As senior marketing communications manager for Crown Zellerbach, a Fortune 500 paper and forest products corporation, he directed promotion programs for the company's major industrial divisions, supervised advertising agency campaigns and trained executives to deliver more effective marketing presentations to corporate clients.

Active in numerous professional organizations, von Beroldingen served as president of the San Francisco Chapter of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA). He is a member of the PRSA Counselors Academy and is a past chairman of the San Francisco Public Relations Round Table, a discussion group for senior PR practitioners. Von Beroldingen received his undergraduate degree in speech from the University of California at Berkeley. Following graduate studies in broadcast communications at San Francisco State University, he worked as an assistant news editor at KCBS radio.

Rhonda Ellen Silva, Founder

Rhonda Ellen Silva is the founder of Optimum Media Training. Silva developed one of the country's most comprehensive media coaching and training programs with Greg Lefevre, former head of CNN San Francisco, and teams of senior public relations professionals and print journalists contributed their expertise to the program. The company was originally founded in 1993.

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