All food photos courtesy of Jeanette Kimball
While I wouldn’t quite qualify as the last Facebook holdout on the planet, I’ve been enough of a Luddite to be a contender probably.
In a way that’s odd because I haven’t approached all social media that way. I became the managing editor of the locally owned online-only and now long defunct Kingston Net-Times in November 1996. I very much doubt any of my almost 300 Facebook friends or 3,852 followers on LinkedIn were working in online media way back more than 18 years ago (just the kind of statement every good journalist knows invariably invites contradiction). I still remember our lone ad salesman trying to sell local advertising in the fall of 1996. It was a tough go given most of our potential mom-and-pop advertisers in Kingston had barely heard of the Internet at that point, although a few had dial-up modem ISP connections and a handful maybe had the brand-new high-speed cable broadband connection. Very few indeed.
The next year, I actually jumped back to print for a second tour of duty with the daily Peterborough Examiner as City Hall reporter (I had worked there from 1985 to 1989 as a court reporter). When I went back to the old Hunter Street building, Jack Marchen still had the desk facing directly across from me in the newsroom and Phil Tyson was still at the desk beside me. The arrival of the Apple iMac was still a year or so away for when we moved buildings down to The Kingsway. I understand the Examiner is now back on Hunter Street in East City. Good on them. Newspapers don’t belong in industrial wastelands, even if it is easier for deliveries. They belong downtown or at least close to it. Where reporters can actually walk their beats and encounter the people they are covering walking to the courthouse or City Hall or in a local coffee shop. Progress being progress, I worked my way up from an iMac to an eMac by the time I arrived at The Independent (which actually was independent) in Brighton, Ontario in 2004. Who remembers eMacs?
I also worked my up from being a reporter to managing editor in that time-honoured journalism tradition of the managing editor who hired me having enough of things less than three months after he hired me and never coming back from lunch one overcast November day. The publisher, knowing talent when she saw it, or at least recognizing the last remaining body in editorial, fast-tracked me to the top. Stories of journalists quitting and not coming back from lunch of course, are legion in the business. My predecessor at the Peterborough Examiner in 1985, I was told had enough by lunch on day one of his probation and never returned from lunch.
As for Facebook, my employer at the Thompson Citizen required me to set up a page on March 19, 2010 to keep an eye on things when our then general manager, Donna Wilson, a Facebook maven ahead of her time, set up a page for the paper. Since I was reluctant to do so, it wound up flying largely under the radar for years as “Cat Sherman,” named after my black cat, who would be with me for another two years. That may not have been 100 per cent in compliance with Facebook’s true identity requirements, but, hey, Facebook has a lot of fine print to read, and it wasn’t me looking to be on Facebook. When Donna decamped from the Thompson Citizen about six months after getting us on Facebook, the publisher told me the de facto job of moderating the Thompson Citizen Facebook page was going to fall to me alone, suggesting that as a journalist I should have been at the rudder solo on it from day one, rather than sharing the job with the general manager whose idea it was.
Ironically, the Thompson Citizen wound up leaving Facebook amidst national headlines in January 2013, after problems with racist comments in relation to aboriginal issues. While many of our colleagues in the media, not to mention academics and human rights officials, publicly applauded us for the principled stand we took, we noticed no one, at least to my knowledge, followed us in our very public pledge, by the publisher, general manager and myself, to permanently have the Thompson Citizen leave Facebook. If you are interested in what happened and the rationale behind the decision, you can read the editorial I penned on behalf of the paper on Jan. 30, 2013 headlined, “Racist anti-aboriginal slurs and offensive comments prompt Thompson Citizen to permanently close Facebook page” at: http://www.thompsoncitizen.net/news/thompson/racist-anti-aboriginal-slurs-and-offensive-comments-prompt-thompson-citizen-to-permanently-close-facebook-page-1.1372321
The Wednesday Thompson Citizen and Friday Nickel Belt News are owned by GVIC Communications Corp. of Vancouver’s Glacier Media Group. They are one of the few, if not the only, Glacier newspaper, not on Facebook in 2015. Perhaps that is just as well if you read my Feb. 11 post “Louis Riel: 21st century hero to the Métis of Manitoba; Rogers Hometown Hockey tour set to roll into Thompson, Manitoba’s hockey hotbed” at https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/02/11/louis-riel-21st-century-hero-to-the-metis-of-manitoba-rogers-hometown-hockey-tour-set-to-roll-into-thompson-manitobas-hockey-hotbed/ and then take a glance at their weekly Thompson Citizen POLL question, which is into its third week up online: “Was racism the reason for the violence in the stands at the midget AA Thompson King Miners game last Sunday, as some have alleged?”
- Yes.
- No.
- It played a role, but it wasn’t the only factor.
As of this morning, as I write this, 49 per cent of the 63 Thompson Citizen readers who responded to the poll were saying racism wasn’t the reason for the violence: http://www.thompsoncitizen.net/thompson-citizen-7.23996?ot=gmg.PopupPageLayout.ot&showResult=true, with the helpful disclaimer, “This is not a scientific poll,” lest readers be inclined perhaps to think it might be.
Needless to say, with the Thompson Citizen no longer on Facebook as of Jan. 30, 2013, “Cat Sherman” had little that he needed to do. Somehow about 20 people back in 2010 had figured out his true identity and requested to be his “friend” and that’s where things sat until late last year when I decided since I was no longer editor of the paper, it might be time to revisit the whole Facebook issue, at least in terms of a personal page. So Cat Sherman got friendlier than he had been in the previous four years and accepted about 10 long-pending Facebook requests that had been hanging out there in virtual limbo forever. I think it quite likely that when I finally accepted the friend requests the requestors very likely had long forgotten they had ever made them in the first place and wondered how they had got a new friend called Cat Sherman.
And then being a good Facebook citizen, Cat Sherman changed his name to his true identity on Feb. 14. And what did I learn? At least so far. Well, I like to think I write a fairly interesting, if admittedly eclectic and maybe even eccentric, blog at times at https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/ On its best day ever last Oct. 4, a month after it started, a story called, “The hauntings of October: Three Thompson unsolved murders: Kerrie Ann Brown, Bernie Carlson and Christopher Ponask” https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/10/03/the-hauntings-of-october-three-thompson-unsolved-murders-kerrie-ann-brown-bernie-carlson-and-christopher-ponask/ had 5,113 “views” the day after it was posted. It’s now been looked at more than 11,000 times.
But while people do link to the blog through Facebook, sure, what they are really interested in, because they are your friends and family, after all, is your holiday pics. People love photos. While I like to think my latest prose on eschatology demands interest on its own merits, my friends want to know where the last photo from holidays was taken. And they readily “like” and often “comment” on photos on Facebook. Instantly. Really.
Perhaps my next Facebook post, or at least one sooner than later, should be on the cuisine and foodstuff we sampled on a gastronomical odyssey through Île du Cap aux Meules in Quebec’s Magdalen Islands, or Îles-de-la-Madelaine, a small archipelago in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence? Maybe even a taste of it right here with some dessert photos? Jeanette has assured me for years, if there is one thing friends on Facebook like as well ,or even more than vacation photos, it is pics of food. And if you combine food with holidays on Facebook, well, really, who needs prose anyway, eh? Bon appétit.
You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22
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