Jeff Elder: 44-year-old columnist at
The Charlotte (N.C.) Observer. "I'm ... the youngest kind of boomer, and ANCIENT for Facebook. I fart around on there for maybe five minutes a day. Just long enough to mark my territory and annoy my friends.
"Funny trivia: Through a friend of a Facebook friend, I stumbled into a very cool N.Y. circle and asked a Tarantino and Jann Wenner of
Rolling Stone to be my Facebook friends. Tarantino politely accepted. Jann Wenner 'Face slammed' me."
Elder's profile photo is "taken with the Photo Booth application on my iMac, then put through their Andy Warhol colorizing process. I take a different photo with a famous person -- Tony Bennett, Jeff
Gordon, Toni Morrison -- for each of my columns, so I wanted to do something different for my personal photo. We jounalists tend to think the smiling mug shot is 'normal,' but it's not. It's just a convention papers fell into fairly recently. If we're going to write uncoventionally -- and I aspire to -- we have to use new media, and experiment with it."
Howard Finberg: 58-year-old interactive learning director at Poynter (
News University). Belongs to many social networking sites, but said he uses two: Facebook, often several times a day, and LinkedIn, about once a week or less.
"Journalists should try social networking sites for one reason: to learn what folks are doing online," Finberg said. "I'm not sure how journalists can use their online presence at work, as there are lots of ethical issues that should be considered."
Jon Healey: 49, editorial writer for the
Los Angeles Times. "An avatar seemed less personal, I guess. I put a page up there for my professional life, not my personal one, so most of the people who see it barely know me.
"I'm on Facebook or LinkedIn just about every day, mostly in response to other people's invitations (not just folks who want to add me as a friend, but also those pimping a group, cause, event, etc.). I started on LinkedIn because it helped me track down a source, and I've stayed because it remains a good way to find people (or be found).
"Similarly, I write about tech and privacy issues, so it made sense to me to get onto and stay active on Facebook to see for myself what the platform was doing. I've joined several other social networks in order to report on some element of them that interested me. These include MySpace, Spock, iMeem and MOG. With the exception of MOG, I don't do anything with my profiles on those sites -- no friends or entries, for example -- because I'm not interested in being part of those communities. MOG is fun, so I've kept up with that from home."
JD Lasica: Social media strategist and co-founder of
Ourmedia.org. Lasica uses
Twitter seven days a week and Facebook four to five times a week.
On his blog, he lists more than a dozen social networks that he belongs to as a way of encouraging readers to converse with him on some of the sites -- even if the "conversation" is just back-and-forth comments posted online. Lasica belongs to such networks as
Flickr,
SpinXpress,
LinkedIn,
Digg,
Ourmedia,
MySpace and
Second Life.
Bruce Owen: 49-year-old police reporter at the
Winnipeg Free Press. "I use Facebook all day to find people -- folks under age 35 -- and do interviews. I also use
MySpace and
Bebo, although Facebook is only site where I've created a public profile. I'm a police reporter.
"Some of the people I contact on Facebook don't want me knowing their phone numbers or addresses, so I use Facebook to ask questions and get replies. I also use Facebook to get photos of some of the people I'm writing about, such as RIP memorial profiles set up to remember people killed in collisions or murder victims. I spend all day on Facebook, just as I do my e-mail."
Jim Wilkes: 56-year-old reporter/photographer at
The Toronto Star. "I may check Facebook daily just for messages or things if I need to send a message to somebody. ... My presence on Facebook is more of a personal thing than a professional thing." As chair of the photojournalism advisory board at Loyalist College, Wilkes uses Facebook to keep in touch with his students and reconnect with old friends.
