Barger Wins Examiner Media Facebook Face Off
In Examiner Media’s Facebook face off, Putnam Examiner editor Kerry Barger takes home the social media gold.
Three of the company’s editors, Barger, Andrew Vitelli and Faith Ann Butcher, did battle over the past month, competing to see who would collect the most “likes” to their respective publication’s new Facebook fan pages.
The company already enjoyed an existing Examiner Media Facebook page. But to complement that, a month ago, Examiner Media also launched Facebook fan pages for each of its four newspapers, The Examiner, The White Plains Examiner, The Northern Westchester Examiner and The Putnam Examiner.
Barger gathered 80 “likes” for the Putnam page. Butcher garnered 57 for her Northern Westchester page. And Vitelli earned 43 “likes” for his White Plains page.
Examiner Media will recognize Barger’s achievement with a $50 contribution to the Putnam/Northern Westchester Women’s Resource Center. Barger is also personally matching that contribution.
Martin Wilbur, editor of The Examiner, did not participate in the challenge. Butcher will be training Wilbur, a veteran print journalist, on the ins and outs of social media. Wilbur will be administering The Examiner’s new Facebook fan page later this month, shortly after the Nov. 8 election. The page has been created but remains inactive.
On Sept. 23 Vitelli was named the winner of a similar month-long Twitter challenge. That win earned him a gift card to the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville.
Publisher Adam Stone is also an administrator of all the pages but limited his posts to avoid skewing the results of the competition.
The October fight for Facebook fans ended last night, on Halloween, with the contest coming to its official end at 11:59 p.m.
Adam has worked in the local news industry for the past two decades in Westchester County and the broader Hudson Valley. Read more from Adam’s author bio here.