Background on Marilyn Jones, Media Training Instructor

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Marilyn Jones delivers media and communications services in Alberta. Her flagship publication, mediamag.ca, was first published in print in 2002 and then taken exclusively online in 2003, making it one of the first online magazines published in Alberta.

Marilyn has been active in the media and publishing communities in Alberta since 1979, with the first publication of Edmonton Magazine, the first city/lifestyle magazine published in Edmonton (and edited at the time by Alan Kellogg, columnist at the Edmonton Journal (then and now), and then at Interface Magazine, Edmonton’s first arts/entertainment magazine.

Other significant related experience that played into Marilyn's creative and professional direction include serving as the executive director of the Alberta Motion Pictures Industries Association, marketing and communications director for the Citadel Theatre and later at the Royal Alexandra Theatre in Toronto and founder of the highly successful First Night Festival in Edmonton. One of her professional claim's to fame is that she named the 124th Street area Gallery Walk while she was working on a piece on the art galleries in the area for Interface Magazine. Also at Interface Magazine, she had of the most pleasurable experiences in her life when she organized and served as the tour guide for many of the art gallery owners in Edmonton for the Picasso Retrospective in New York in 1980. Twenty eight years later, she organized the world’s largest community blogging event in Edmonton on New Years’ Day 2008.

Graduating from the University of Alberta with a BA in Honor’s English (1995) and from Simon Fraser University with a MA in Publishing (1997), she worked with the founders of many of Alberta’s flagship magazines, Jackie Flanagan (AlbertaViews), Barb Dacks (Legacy Magazine), Teresa Mitchell (Law Now) and Ruth Kelly (Alberta Venture). Her first significant project after graduating was in the design and creation of a remarkably successful book loyalty program for Audreys Books.  

Projects that played a part in her creative and professional development during her university studies include working on digitizing content for the Orlando Project, converting a Romanticism anthology from print to online publication, merchandising the mountains of books in preparation for the opening the new Chapters store in Burnaby -- then the largest bookstore west of Toronto -- and interning at Chapters Books during the first year of their operation, four doors down from the office of CEO Larry Stevenson, during the turbulent years of Canadian publishing and bookselling.

In 2004, Marilyn was invited to be a panelist on E-Writing: New Media Frontiers for Get Publishing, an organization with which she remains involved. Most recently, Marilyn was a sponsor and the ‘official’ photographer and videographer for Get Publishing 2009.  [photo captions and video still to come]

Since 2006, Marilyn has been offering media and communications training directed to baby-boomers and anyone else who wants to keep their media and communication skills sharp in Alberta.  Presentations include Social Media Marketing for the Canadian Public Relations Society – Edmonton branch in 2007, Social Media for Writers & Editors at the 2008 Editors’ Association National Conference, a keynote presentation on Crisis Communications and the Media for the Alberta Student Transportation Advisory Council in 2009 as well as custom social media training for the Edmonton Folk Music Festival and for the College & Association of Registered Nurses of Alberta and media training for the Venture Prize 2009 Finalists for TecEdmonton.

For the past few months, Marilyn has been in the research and development phase for two new webinar series, one on publishing newsletter and another on social media technologies, which will launch on May 28. On June 1, 2009, she will launch an online publication in development for the past three years, mediainalberta.ca. On June 13, she will present a course called Blog Your Book in Grant MacEwan's Writing Works program. In September, she will present her first Media in the Mountains training session in Jasper, on Joomla!, the world's most popular open source content management systems. In October, she will present a seminar at the Literacy and Learning Symposium 2009 in Red Deer on Communications in the Age of YouTube.

If you want to read more about Marilyn's background and perspectives on corporate and social media, see the About Us section at rivercityproductions.ca where you will find posted the set of interview questions that Lee Anne Waines, editor of Notebook, Red Deer College's alumni magazine, sent to Marilyn for her to provide background for her cover story in the Spring 2009 issue and Marilyn's answers.