For social media editors, the worst nightmare is accidentally posting something personal on the work account.
On Monday night, NPR swing editor Christopher Dean Hopkins lived that nightmare when he posted about Ramona, on NPR's Facebook account:
Twelve minutes later, after realizing his mistake, he edited that post and replaced it with this:
"We don't generally delete posts, so I tried to do it in a way that would be transparent," Hopkins says. "My job is to promote our good work, and I catastrophically failed in that last night."
But what Hopkins didn't anticipate — and we didn't either — was how much people needed something "feel good," after back-to-back-to-back-to-back tragedies — the Las Vegas massacre and the devastation in Puerto Rico, Florida and the Texas Gulf Coast from hurricanes.
And Ramona — who isn't quite a year old yet — was it.
Now there are Ramona hashtags: #ramonaupdates, #bringbackramona, #ramonaforever. And she's got friends at the Houston Zoo.
@NPR, How's #Ramona this morning? Asking for a friend. #friendsofRamona pic.twitter.com/vMdyubSR1R
— Houston Zoo (@houstonzoo) October 3, 2017
And there's a petition calling for an updated story about Ramona (you're welcome!) and demanding a small raise (looks at bosses) for Hopkins. At least 250 people were all about this (looks at bosses, again).
The verdict is still out on whether there will be regular Ramona updates.
"I suppose if people keep promising to pledge to NPR and it doesn't distract from the very good work our NPR journalists do, we'll see," Hopkins says.
But here's the news everybody really wants to know: Ramona is not a cat! But Ramona does have a cat. You're welcome, Interwebz!
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