My name is Phillip LeConte.

For over 30 years, I’ve helped the Austin business community master their digital world. Based on West Seventh Street in Austin, Texas, I’ve been providing digital guidance since the 56k dial-up days as an early adopter of emerging technology.

While my career has careened through journalism, photography, multimedia production, nonprofit work, and public advocacy, I’ve spent a lifetime doing essentially the same thing—solving problems and expressing the world around me using words and images.

Here’s the speed-walk.

In 1984, fresh out of the University of Illinois with a degree in broadcast journalism, I pointed my diesel Rabbit west and landed in Los Angeles, alternating between freelance writing and screenwriting.

In 1986, my article “The Psychologist as TV Guide” for Psychology Today—a profile of Harvard psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint, then a consultant to The Bill Cosby Show—helped legitimize the emerging role of psychological consultants in sitcoms.

The piece led to my position as Assistant Editor of The California Psychologist and marked my first encounter with a personal computer—an experience as eccentric as the psychologists on staff.

During that period, I interviewed internationally known figures, including child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim. A youthful question about Freud’s relevance prompted a diatribe so cruel and protracted that, briefly, I thought of myself as a colleague.

I soon refocused my freelance work on creative artists and public figures I admired—and who wouldn’t make me cry. These included Roy Scheider, Sally Field, director Robert Benton, Peter Weller, and journalist Bill Moyers, whose work with Joseph Campbell remains a lasting influence.

My final years in Los Angeles alternated between screenwriting—The Albacore Club and The Beat, co-written with Noah Stern—and the creative malnourishment of working as a unit publicist for Dick Clark Productions and publicity coordinator for 21 Jump Street.

Austin, Nonprofits and Civic Work

In 1988, I moved to Austin, Texas, and began working as a programming consultant to nonprofit organizations. During this time, I collaborated closely with the FBI Director’s wife, Alice Sessions, on youth-focused programs.

That work taught me how programs succeed—or fail—in the real world: how messages land, where attention drifts, and what earns trust. Alongside early digital experimentation, it became the training ground for the multimedia and web work I do today.

Today

West Austin Media is the natural extension of this work. I collaborate with people who understand Austin and the importance of having their digital act together.

My approach is simple:

Keep it real.
Keep it simple.
Make it meaningful.

In short: speak human in a digital world.