Mr. Carman started his career in advertising and marketing in Portland, Oregon in the early 90's. For the next decade, his agency created work for Hollywood Video, Intel, and Nautilus Fitness, among many others. In 2001, Mr. Carman started mywebpal.com, a technology company that specialized in taking newspapers online. Over a period of five years, the company became the second largest provider in the United States, hosting over 180 newspapers on its proprietary platform.
I was always home all day writing. I was trying to figure out how can I help kids get off screens and want to read. Even pre-COVID, kids were spending about four hours a day on screens, on average. With COVID, it was up to between six and eight hours a day, and [Stine] and I both know that this has a lot of adverse effects, dropping reading scores dramatically.