Are you wasting your time writing about drum subjects on Facebook? You may be.
I predict that Facebook will eventually become obsolete and be replaced by a new internet site or other technology yet to be discovered. Don’t think so? Have you looked at your MySpace page lately? The information and knowledge you pass on to other drummers may be lost to the ages one day.
The other day I asked my seventeen year old student if he was on Facebook and he said no, almost with a look of indignation; “Facebook is for old people” he said. I agree to a point. Facebook is predominantly for keeping up with family and friends, for adult men wasting their time arguing about politics, for Russians posting fake news, for posting funny videos and memes, and for groups conversing about favorite interests, like drums and drummimg. At least that’s what I’m seeing.
I have several Facebook pages; one personal, and two business pages that I automatically push Not So Modern Drummer articles to. I don’t spend a lot of time posting personal or drum stuff on Facebook anymore. I think it is still valid but there are lot of drawbacks to it. At one time, probably ten years ago, I considered moving Not So Modern Drummer completely to Facebook instead of a website and a monthly newsletter until I realized that all the content could be lost at any time and that Facebook could kick me off for some perceived infraction of their rules. I could not accept that lack of control over my business.
One aspect that is pertinent to Not So Modern Drummer are the drummer and drumming groups. I subscribe to almost every drummer group out there - hundreds of them - but check in primarily on three or four of them, mainly to find writers to invite to write for Not So Modern Drummer. Facebook groups lack a visible thread list and its search function is not very functional, unlike the old usenet text groups which had highly organized thread trees and were very searchable. Those groups became Google Groups. Just as UseNet and MySpace faded away, Facebook will be relegated to some outdated technology corner of the internet .
The reason I bring all this up is the question of permanency of the drum related posts that you write on Facebook and why I think you should be posting your knowledge to Not So Modern Drummer. I see some serious and sometimes very in-depth writing about drums, drummers, and drumming on Facebook that I know will be lost or hidden very soon in the “feed” as it scrolls along. Facebook is not about adding or preserving content to be kept for the ages. It is about keeping the conversation going - keeping the person who is reading engaged and scrolling - to see more ads.
One of the cool things about the NSMD website is that every article since we went digital in 2012 is still on the site and very searchable in the Archive link. We plan on adding ALL the articles back to 1988 at some point. If you are knowledgable - If you write with experience and authority about an area of the percussion cosmos - I feel you may be throwing away your talents and time on Facebook to a degree. It can be a bully pulpit but, in a lot of ways, but it is a bully pulpit that doesn’t last for very long as the feed travels down the road. At least look at the NSMD archive to get an idea of how we preserve every thing.
I implore you to write for Not So Modern Drummer and have your text and images stored indefinitely where it can be accessed, read and appreciated by drummers for decades to come. We have a solid plan in place to keep it going in perpetuity. You can just copy and paste your text and images from your Facebook page to Not So Modern Drummer. That’s a bona fide article.
The way the writers submit their work is pretty simple. They send me an email with pictures attached as jpeg or .png files. The text can be written in the body of the mail or attached as a Word or other similar .txt file. I edit the text for grammatical errors, accuracy and sometimes remove any redundancy. The writing style is just conversational. You don’t have to be a professional writer.
Then I upload it all to the SquareSpace site, usually with the pictures in a slide show, and the text below. I moved away from trying to “lay out” the pictures within the text because this is not a print magazine anymore. That arrangement does not work well on a pad or phone. At the end of the month I gather all that month’s submissions and drop them into the Square Space email newsletter program. Then I test it in an email to myself, then send it out to the 31,000+ subscribers.
There is no word count limit or length requirement. Your article could be no longer than the Facebook paragraph post you made or it could be 3000 words long. We are not limited by page space. Pixels are free and the page can scroll down forever.
All our writers write for free since 2012 and are not required to send something in every month. Some have only sent in one or two articles, which is fine. I work for free too. It’s a labor of love for all involved. The main thing is to preserve the history of drums, drummers and drumming.
So if you want to see your written contributions preserved in a searchable archive instead of being lost in the feed on Facebook, please consider sending your writings, photos and videos to NSMD. Here is the archive:
https://www.notsomoderndrummer.com/#/archive-2
Please contact me, george@notsomoderndrummer.com ,if you are at all interested. The only requirements are that you are a drum nerd and have at least a sixth grade education. :-)