About Fritz

Emmy winner. Jeopardy! winner. Cheerful writer.

 

My name is Fritz Holznagel. I'm a professional writer who likes to turn corporate jargon and high-tech talk into clear, friendly words. Clients past and present include Google, Ooyala, Intuit, Keyloop, SessionM, YouTube, and Eventbrite.  

My special joy is rewriting and co-writing with others to make their words clean and strong. 

I won an Emmy Award in 1992 for scripting the CBS TV special A Claymation Easter Celebration. Soon after that I began to focus on fun facts, writing for CD-ROMs like Mindscape's 20th Century Video Almanac and Broderbund's Where in the U.S.A. is Carmen SanDiego?

That led me into the early Internet, and in 1995 I became Editor in Chief of the web review site Point, where I edited the book The World Wide Web Top 1000. Point was purchased by Lycos, and for them I created the popular feature The Lycos 50 -- the first weekly ranking of the web's most-searched terms, and the forerunner to sites like Google Trends. I've written for Google since 2004, as a full-time employee and as a vendor, and in recent years I've given a series of writing workshops for various Google marketing teams.

My friend Paul Hehn and I created the biographical guide Who2.com in 1998. The site is still thriving as a personal project, and more than two decades later we've written nearly 5000 thumbnail sketches of famous people. I've also written for the Dictionary of American History (here's my entry on the Boy Scouts) and other publications. In 2019, I published The Ultimate Droodles Compendium, a retrospective of the cartoons and humor of forgotten comedy genius Roger Price.

As for Jeopardy!: I was a four-time winner on the show in 1994. The next year I returned and beat 14 other champs to win the 1995 Jeopardy Tournament of Champions and the grand prize of $100,000. I also represented the U.S. in the 1996 Jeopardy Olympic Tournament, and was invited back to the 2005 Ultimate Tournament of Champions and the 2014 Battle of the Decades. I'm also the author of the popular buzzing manifesto Secrets of the Buzzer, now in its third edition. I'm also the quizmaster for the wonderful news site The Conversation.

I'm always keen on any project that combines facts and fun.

Need a writer? Please contact me.