Around the time that my appointment as a bishop was announced I found myself being interviewed a lot. One of those interviews was broadcast only yesterday. For those who understand French, you can go to the web page of Second Regard for the segment Évêque à 40 ans. So far the feedback has been good. [...]
Around the time that my appointment as a bishop was announced I found myself being interviewed a lot. One of those interviews was broadcast only yesterday. For those who understand French, you can go to the web page of Second Regard for the segment Évêque à 40 ans. So far the feedback has been good.
Bienvenue à tous les visiteurs qui sont venus ici après avoir regardé l’émission!
I am presently at the annual plenary meeting of the Canadian bishops, taking place in Cornwall, Ontario. I just turned on the TV to catch the evening news, and I noticed that CTV will be running a piece we recorded a couple of weeks ago. A warm welcome to any new visitors! UPDATE #1: I [...]
I am presently at the annual plenary meeting of the Canadian bishops, taking place in Cornwall, Ontario. I just turned on the TV to catch the evening news, and I noticed that CTV will be running a piece we recorded a couple of weeks ago. A warm welcome to any new visitors!
UPDATE #1: I just saw the news report. A happy, light-hearted kind of piece. I think I came across as a joyful person, and I’m pleased about that because I actually am! One small detail they did get wrong is that my title has changed from “Father Dowd” to “Bishop Dowd”, although to be honest I don’t mind that tiny error — there is a genuine spiritual paternity to being a priest, and all the happy dads I know treasure their role (and title!) as “father”.
UPDATE #2: The video referenced in the news piece is this one:
I originally posted this video shortly after the ordination, but as it came up again (and unfortunately was misreferenced on the CTV web site) I’m posting it again. Enjoy!
I was asked by a media specialist yesterday how many visits my blog actually gets. A darned good question! I have not tracked that stuff much for a while, as (to be honest) I wasn’t that interested. But I did think it might be interesting to see how things might have changed since my appointment [...]
I was asked by a media specialist yesterday how many visits my blog actually gets. A darned good question! I have not tracked that stuff much for a while, as (to be honest) I wasn’t that interested. But I did think it might be interesting to see how things might have changed since my appointment as bishop.
According to a web statistics program called “Webalizer”, provided by my hosting service, in the month of July I had 180,125 “hits” on pages in the “fatherdowd.net” domain, with 24,630 of these hits being actual “visits”. In August I had 216,451 “hits”, with 30,271 “visits”. I can’t tell how much of this traffic is human beings versus robots crawling the Internet looking for content (e.g. for search engines), but when I looked at the daily data I did see spikes on days when major news pieces came out. That is consistent with people becoming curious and wandering over to check things out. I might add that the July statistics were fairly small until July 11, when the daily numbers doubled (makes sense, that is when the news came out), and then they had a big spike on July 18, when the article in the Globe and Mail really broke the news to a broader audience. This means that the numbers are consistent with human and not robot behaviour… which means I’ve had a lot of people coming to visit, perhaps for the first time. Welcome!
While these numbers are interesting, I wonder if there would be a way to improve the gathering of these stats even further. If any blog readers have ideas in that regard, I’m open to suggestions.
I had a radio interview this morning at the CBC building near the Jacques-Cartier bridge. The staff very kindly sent me this photo of me in the studio. The name of the show was C’est bien meilleur le matin (for a translation, see the title of this post :-) ), and yes, the interview was [...]
I had a radio interview this morning at the CBC building near the Jacques-Cartier bridge. The staff very kindly sent me this photo of me in the studio.
The name of the show was C’est bien meilleur le matin (for a translation, see the title of this post :-) ), and yes, the interview was in French. Click here if you’d like to give it a listen, although I could only get it to work in Explorer (Firefox wanted me to install additional software for some reason).
I’ve never had any training in media interviews apart from the experience of being interviewed itself. I learn something new each time, and class was definitely in session this time… now it’s time to reflect on lessons learned.
While many news organizations have been running with the story of my episcopal nomination this week, particularly in radio and television, I was told that newspapers often save their human interest stories for the weekend. And so it is: a couple of articles have appeared in local Saturday papers today, one in English and one [...]
While many news organizations have been running with the story of my episcopal nomination this week, particularly in radio and television, I was told that newspapers often save their human interest stories for the weekend. And so it is: a couple of articles have appeared in local Saturday papers today, one in English and one in French:
These article titles are quite clever, actually. “Blogfather” makes it sound like I’m going to have to talk like Marlon Brando’s Vito Corleone, making people spiritual offers they can’t refuse. I also like “Épiscopat 2.0″ — I was actually thinking of the rough English equivalent “Bishop 2.0″ at some point to describe brother bishops who are adept in social media (as I’m not the only one).
So please enjoy! And now, while this has been quite a ride, the weekend has arrived and I need to focus on being a priest. I had to decline a media request that came in this morning, for example, because I simply am not available: I’ve got a wedding this afternoon with the reception this evening, and Sunday mass tomorrow with other events in the afternoon and evening. In other words, bread and butter ministry — not everything can be done over the Internet!
The recent interest in my appointment as bishop has meant that some in the media have started calling me “the blogging bishop”. In all fairness, though, I want to point out that there are other bishops out there who have blogs of their own, too! Take, for example, the blog The Journey of a Bishop, [...]
The recent interest in my appointment as bishop has meant that some in the media have started calling me “the blogging bishop”. In all fairness, though, I want to point out that there are other bishops out there who have blogs of their own, too! Take, for example, the blog The Journey of a Bishop, by Archbishop Terrence Prendergast of Ottawa, whose blog was recommended to me by the Apostolic Nuncio himself when we met on July 5. Do readers have any other bishop blogs to suggest?
UPDATE: Bishop Paul-André Durocher of Alexandria-Cornwall has recently begun a French-language blog called Chante et Marche. He’s also quite active on Facebook.
Yesterday it was CBC, today local CTV. I’ve just left an interview, and now additional footage is being done (called B-roll). Like I did with yesterday’s post, I’ll add a link to video once it is done. Other requests are also coming in for print and radio. Whew! My main hope is that this will [...]
Yesterday it was CBC, today local CTV. I’ve just left an interview, and now additional footage is being done (called B-roll). Like I did with yesterday’s post, I’ll add a link to video once it is done.
Other requests are also coming in for print and radio. Whew! My main hope is that this will do some good for the spreading the Kingdom of God. A brother priest pointed out something quite interesting when I spoke with him on the phone this morning: today’s gospel passage at mass was about Jesus getting into a boat to teach the people, using parables. While he never compromised his message, he was willing to use the technology of his day (i.e. the boat) to reach as many people as possible, and he adapted the way he taught his messages (i.e. using parables) so as to meet people where they were at, regardless of their social status, level of education, etc. Like Marshall McLuhan said, with Jesus the medium really is the message!
UPDATE: This is a link to the video in question. For the sake of completeness, I’d just want to point out I’m not actually the first Roman Catholic priest with a blog, but the first one *in Canada*. I knew of 4 or 5 other priests in the USA who were ahead of me. Ah, those were the days!
It seems the story of my appointment as auxiliary bishop in Montreal is spreading… it was on CBC last night, for example. This will likely mean more visitors to this site. A warm welcome to everyone dropping by!
It seems the story of my appointment as auxiliary bishop in Montreal is spreading… it was on CBC last night, for example. This will likely mean more visitors to this site. A warm welcome to everyone dropping by!
I’ve had an interesting visit from CBC this morning — be sure to check your evening news to see the results! UPDATE: For those who didn’t catch it on TV, here is a link to the video.
