The young journalist and this old one took seats across from each other outside the coffee shop. That much was familiar to this fogey anyway.
Foo “Don’t call me Andrew” Conner squats in an otherwise abandoned North Side house and bikes to about 600 events a year, shooting photos and writing for his website, Jekko.com. He’s 32 and bills himself on Twitter as “Transformational Journalist, Social Entrepreneur and Hopeless Romantic.”
That’s no overreach. Foo has 115,000 Twitter followers, or about 56 times what I have there. He plays social media like a fiddle, or maybe a full orchestra, and I was there to learn from him because I play social media like a Crackerjack box kazoo.
Foo bought the domain name “Jekko” in 2004 when he was just 19. “It meant nothing in any language so we could track it.” Back then, he was living in “a small third world nation called Charleston, W.Va.,” booking music festivals and handling the website for a skate park over the state line in Ohio.
His joke about Charleston is made with affection. He grew up just north of there on a little farm in Mink Shoals. His father, Glenn, was a photographer for United Press International, the news agency that once served thousands of newspapers. Foo immerses himself in the Pittsburgh newspapers each day even as his photos and stories shoot right past them.
“It’s an ecoystem and no one’s understanding that,” he said. He lamented that too many millennials don’t know how to call a real journalist, and that a recent Oxford University study showed that Twitter users got more news during the 2016 election from conspiratorial, Russian or junk news sites than from professional news sources.
Most of his Jekko audience is out of town, and it’s heavy with women 18 to 34. But he says the photos he’s taken of Uber driverless cars — “I just drank by the river and watched the cars go by” — have appeared in 172 news outlets. He lets anyone use them at no charge as long as they credit him and link back to his site.
He moved to Pittsburgh in 2005 for a woman. “It didn’t work out but I fell in love with the city. I could be anywhere in the world. This is where it’s at. We are shaping so much here.”
Matthew Conboy, 40, who teaches photography at Robert Morris University, said Foo “pours every bit of his life into his work and I don’t think there’s a big separation between the two.” If there’s a single word to describe his work it’s “exhausting,” Mr. Conboy said.
They met three years ago when Foo covered a garden party at the Mattress Factory museum and then wandered into the after-party at Mr. Conboy’s nearby Mexican War Streets home. Foo said he couldn’t stay long because he had to drive three and half hours the next day to photograph a riot at “an anarchist skateboard commune in rural southeast Ohio.” Mr. Conboy had to see that, so he went with him and Mr. Conboy wound up winning the Silver Eye Keystone Award for his photos of Skatopia.
Foo doesn’t ever relax in a way most people would recognize. When he’s not co-directing Randyland with his friend Randy Gilson, he helps run a YouTube channel, Greek Gadget Guru, with 514,000 subscribers.
“My friends and I make superhero weapons. That’s how I blow off steam on the weekends. I’m a poor man’s Bruce Wayne. I get into galas with my press pass and at night I make superhero weapons.”
Someday he’ll have to show me his Spiderman web shooter, complete with grappling hook. For now I was hearing how old-fashioned shoe leather put him at the Roberto Clemente Museum in Lawrenceville Sunday afternoon to cover the fundraiser for hurricane relief in Puerto Rico.
A grade-school boy went up to Mayor Bill Peduto there and said, “I don’t have much; will this be enough?” and handed over two quarters. Foo teared up and so did the mayor, he said.
“To me there’s no war between new and old journalism,” he said.
I wrote that down in the same kind of pocket notebook I’ve used for nearly 40 years. I asked how he took notes and he said he mostly jots in Google Keep or Evernote. I’d heard of neither, but I finally checked the brand on my notebook. A belated thank you, Portage.
Not long after Foo’s explanation of online “sentiment scores” and “syntax recognition” sailed over my head, we parted. At a nearby table, a millennial promised her friend, “I’m going to email you the article about cooperative overlapping.” I had no idea what that was either, but I’m guessing it’s never too late to learn.
Brian O’Neill: boneill@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1947 or Twitter @brotheroneill
First Published: October 5, 2017, 12:27 p.m.
