Here is a creative, entrepreneurial approach to starting a new local magazine. This is an excerpt--to read the entire article, click here.
Former Hippie Breaks New Ground as he Helps Modern Americans Come to Grips with Popular Culture
By Michael Ireland
Chief Correspondent, ASSIST News Service
NASHVILLE, TN (ANS) -- Joel Freeman, Ph.D is a man of many talents and wears many different entrepreneurial hats.
He left home when he was seventeen, a self-described "long-haired Hippie, dope-smoking fool, traveling about six-thousand miles in North America, living off the road."
But you wouldn't know that from his current appearance or groundbreaking projects to help people across America think about Christianity in new and creative ways.
He's been chaplain for 19 years for an NBA team the Washington Bullets, now called the Washington Wizards, has written seven books that are now in twenty-eight languages, he and his wife Shirley have four children ages 22 to 29, and they live in Maryland. He has some of the most creative book titles of any author in America today.
I caught up with him earlier this year at the NRB convention in Nashville TN, where we discussed several of his ongoing projects.
One of four projects he's working on right now for this year is a magazine called 'Every Day Matters', featuring Christian surgeon Dr. Ben Carson on the front cover.
"Well it's a different kind of a model -- a lot of magazines are folding up shop and going to the Internet; this is a different model. Basically in our local church I wanted to have something that would be of benefit to entrepreneurs in the local church and at the same time would be a help to strengthen the personal evangelism muscles of people within the congregation. So what we did was sold ads and we developed forty 'felt needs' ranging from financial, to health, to spiritual, to moral, to relational -- all kinds of different felt needs. We narrowed it down to some basic ones. We did an interview with Ben Carson. Then we have one about men and their emotions, raising kids without raising your voice, tips to help you care for aging parents."
Freeman is particularly concerned about what he calls "The New Bullies" and the phenomenon of cyber bullying and online harassment with young people use the anonymity of the Internet to harm each other.
"It's just a real interesting article about how to protect our children and how to make our kids aware of this particular aspect of life, the reality of it, and how many kids get impacted by it, with some good tips and tools. But I wanted to have something kind of like Jesus with the woman at the well -- they didn't immediately start talking about him being the Messiah, he didn't rip off his toga and his t-shirt says 'I'm the Messiah,'" said Freeman.
"Instead they start talking about water -- something that she was familiar with -- and then they moved from the natural to the spiritual. So the purpose of the magazine is to print up 25,000 copies, anyone listening to my voice right now if you're part of the local church and are thinking of a unique outreach tool, basically what we do is we provide the disc with all of the graphics for $750. For some just to do the cover would cost $1,500 to $2,500 from a graphic standpoint. So we're giving a gift to a local church with a license for about fifteen miles around the church and then someone adopts it -- they sell the ads locally and then print it locally so they have control of the cost and everything else. It's not me trying to make money off the situation. No salaries are given or taken in this whole situation and then what happens is ultimately the local church has 25,000 copies of a magazine and they put it at the back of the church every service and people grab ten, twenty, thirty of them.They adopt a grocery store, keep it stacked with the magazines..."
Freeman said he thought of it as a way to get people talking about spiritual matters.
"It's a conversation starter to get people talking and then ultimately seeing how the Holy Spirit opens up the opportunity to share their faith," he said.
The website for the new magazine is www.outreachmag.com
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Monday, June 22, 2009
Building a Digital Audience for News
From Journalism 2.0
Building a digital audience for news
Posted: 22 Jun 2009 07:24 AM PDT
(NOTE: The following series of posts is an excerpt from my upcoming book, Journalism Next, which will be published by CQPress and is due out in the fall.)
Can marketing and analytics save journalism? Not on their own, of course. But we live in a world where the amount of content produced has increased exponentially, yet we still each have just two eyes, two ears and one mouth. So journalism needs to find new benefits from new marketing strategies and measurement tactics.
This type of marketing is not advertising, or slogans, or logos. And this type of measurement isn’t counting bylines for a performance review. Digital publishers need to establish effective publishing goals and be consistent in their pursuit of those goals. Quality content published in some significant quantity and engineered to be easily found in search engines is a recipe for a successful digital publishing business.
“When a person conducts a search, you are competing against nine other results on that first result page,” Monica Wright wrote on the Search Engine Journal Web site. “Your title tag and description are your first impression to attract potential audience. You can capture new online readership by setting yourself apart with useful and engaging tags.
“But above all - good writing still prevails. Quality, relevant, in-depth content will not only attract the bots, but will capture new audience as well.”
In order to build your audience online, you need to analyze what you publish, what your readers like and don’t like, and then do more of what they like. You also need to make sure that your content, especially that which your current readers have shown interest in, can be found by new audiences through search and shared through social media tools.
As newsrooms have taken on publishing new forms of content – blogs, video, breaking news updates - to new platforms - email, mobile, Twitter – new structures need to be put in place. Management guru Peter Drucker said years ago that “what gets measured gets managed.” In recent years, many have improved on that quote and say “what gets measured gets done.”
So newsrooms now track and measure everything they do. At the News-Sentinel in Knoxville, for example, there is a detailed chart with everyone’s name listed down the left-most column and a long list of skills listed across the top. When someone can prove to a manager that he or she has mastered a new skill, the proper box is checked or, in some cases, a smiley face sticker is used to represent the progress.
Tom Chester, news operations manager at the News-Sentinel, begins each weekday with a stand-up meeting in the newsroom. The first item on the agenda is a detailed report of content published and traffic generated the previous day. “We track updates on all platforms: web, mobile, email,” Chester said. “We started with almost nothing and now we’re up to about 500 updates per week.”
If newsroom leaders had simply announced at a staff meeting the need to learn new skills and publish more frequently to more platforms, little progress would have been made. Instead, the formerly print-centric newsroom – which has also published 3,000 videos since 2006 – has the structure in place to measure and manage the new content, the newsroom was able to show significant progress and build upon its successes.
Developing a culture and processes to track and measure your work product is essential to competing in this data-driven world. Traditional journalists may cringe at the idea that their artful storytelling or their dogged investigations can be reduced to a “work product,” but nearly all digital publishers are building their business on the inventory of content produced, either by journalists or other writers, bloggers or photographers. So producing that product on a regular schedule is vital to a functioning business.
And without the business, there are no paychecks. This reality applies to mainstream news companies and independent journalism startups.
Track. Measure. Adapt. It’s the way the Web works.
Building a digital audience for news
Posted: 22 Jun 2009 07:24 AM PDT
(NOTE: The following series of posts is an excerpt from my upcoming book, Journalism Next, which will be published by CQPress and is due out in the fall.)
Can marketing and analytics save journalism? Not on their own, of course. But we live in a world where the amount of content produced has increased exponentially, yet we still each have just two eyes, two ears and one mouth. So journalism needs to find new benefits from new marketing strategies and measurement tactics.
This type of marketing is not advertising, or slogans, or logos. And this type of measurement isn’t counting bylines for a performance review. Digital publishers need to establish effective publishing goals and be consistent in their pursuit of those goals. Quality content published in some significant quantity and engineered to be easily found in search engines is a recipe for a successful digital publishing business.
“When a person conducts a search, you are competing against nine other results on that first result page,” Monica Wright wrote on the Search Engine Journal Web site. “Your title tag and description are your first impression to attract potential audience. You can capture new online readership by setting yourself apart with useful and engaging tags.
“But above all - good writing still prevails. Quality, relevant, in-depth content will not only attract the bots, but will capture new audience as well.”
In order to build your audience online, you need to analyze what you publish, what your readers like and don’t like, and then do more of what they like. You also need to make sure that your content, especially that which your current readers have shown interest in, can be found by new audiences through search and shared through social media tools.
As newsrooms have taken on publishing new forms of content – blogs, video, breaking news updates - to new platforms - email, mobile, Twitter – new structures need to be put in place. Management guru Peter Drucker said years ago that “what gets measured gets managed.” In recent years, many have improved on that quote and say “what gets measured gets done.”
So newsrooms now track and measure everything they do. At the News-Sentinel in Knoxville, for example, there is a detailed chart with everyone’s name listed down the left-most column and a long list of skills listed across the top. When someone can prove to a manager that he or she has mastered a new skill, the proper box is checked or, in some cases, a smiley face sticker is used to represent the progress.
Tom Chester, news operations manager at the News-Sentinel, begins each weekday with a stand-up meeting in the newsroom. The first item on the agenda is a detailed report of content published and traffic generated the previous day. “We track updates on all platforms: web, mobile, email,” Chester said. “We started with almost nothing and now we’re up to about 500 updates per week.”
If newsroom leaders had simply announced at a staff meeting the need to learn new skills and publish more frequently to more platforms, little progress would have been made. Instead, the formerly print-centric newsroom – which has also published 3,000 videos since 2006 – has the structure in place to measure and manage the new content, the newsroom was able to show significant progress and build upon its successes.
Developing a culture and processes to track and measure your work product is essential to competing in this data-driven world. Traditional journalists may cringe at the idea that their artful storytelling or their dogged investigations can be reduced to a “work product,” but nearly all digital publishers are building their business on the inventory of content produced, either by journalists or other writers, bloggers or photographers. So producing that product on a regular schedule is vital to a functioning business.
And without the business, there are no paychecks. This reality applies to mainstream news companies and independent journalism startups.
Track. Measure. Adapt. It’s the way the Web works.
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Is Amazon Taking Over the Book Business?
From Time magazine--a very sobering look. This is an excerpt. To read the entire article click here.
Is Amazon Taking Over the Book Business?
By Lev Grossman and Andrea Sachs Monday, Jun. 22, 2009
Cayla Kluver was 14 when she wrote her first novel. It's a fantasy novel called Legacy, and it's about a certain Princess Alera of Hytanica who's being forced to marry the handsome but obnoxious Lord Steldor when she's really interested in the handsome but mysterious Narian, who hails from Hytanica's bitter enemy, Cokyri.
When she was 15, Kluver and her mom, who live in Wisconsin, formed their own publishing company to publish Legacy. Sales were modest, but the book attracted some rave reader reviews on Amazon.com At 16, when most authors are years away from getting their first big break, Kluver is getting her second: this August, Amazon is going to relaunch Legacy on a grand scale.
The whole story is practically a fantasy: Amazon plucked Kluver out of obscurity to be the first author in its Amazon Encore program, which takes worthy but overlooked books and republishes them for a wider audience. But there's something odd about it too. If Amazon is a bookstore, it's supposed to be buying from publishers, not competing with them. Right?
(See the 50 best websites of 2008.)
Except it isn't just a bookstore. As numerous publishing journalists and bloggers have pointed out, Amazon has diversified itself so comprehensively over the past five years that it's hard to say exactly what it is anymore. Amazon has a presence in almost every niche of the book industry. It runs a print-on-demand service (BookSurge) and a self-publishing service (CreateSpace). It sells e-books and an e-device to read them on (the Kindle, a new version of which, the DX, went on sale June 10). In 2008 alone, Amazon acquired Audible.com a leading audiobooks company; AbeBooks, a major online used-book retailer; and Shelfari, a Facebook-like social network for readers. In April of this year, it snapped up Lexcycle, which makes an e-reading app for the iPhone called Stanza. And now there's Amazon Encore, which makes Amazon a print publisher too.
No question, Amazon is the most forward-thinking company in the book business. If there's a Steve Jobs of books, it's Amazon's founder, Jeff Bezos. His vision is defining the way books will be bought and sold and written and read in the digital world — which is to say, the world. The question is whether there will be room in it for anyone besides Amazon.
Is Amazon Taking Over the Book Business?
By Lev Grossman and Andrea Sachs Monday, Jun. 22, 2009
Cayla Kluver was 14 when she wrote her first novel. It's a fantasy novel called Legacy, and it's about a certain Princess Alera of Hytanica who's being forced to marry the handsome but obnoxious Lord Steldor when she's really interested in the handsome but mysterious Narian, who hails from Hytanica's bitter enemy, Cokyri.
When she was 15, Kluver and her mom, who live in Wisconsin, formed their own publishing company to publish Legacy. Sales were modest, but the book attracted some rave reader reviews on Amazon.com At 16, when most authors are years away from getting their first big break, Kluver is getting her second: this August, Amazon is going to relaunch Legacy on a grand scale.
The whole story is practically a fantasy: Amazon plucked Kluver out of obscurity to be the first author in its Amazon Encore program, which takes worthy but overlooked books and republishes them for a wider audience. But there's something odd about it too. If Amazon is a bookstore, it's supposed to be buying from publishers, not competing with them. Right?
(See the 50 best websites of 2008.)
Except it isn't just a bookstore. As numerous publishing journalists and bloggers have pointed out, Amazon has diversified itself so comprehensively over the past five years that it's hard to say exactly what it is anymore. Amazon has a presence in almost every niche of the book industry. It runs a print-on-demand service (BookSurge) and a self-publishing service (CreateSpace). It sells e-books and an e-device to read them on (the Kindle, a new version of which, the DX, went on sale June 10). In 2008 alone, Amazon acquired Audible.com a leading audiobooks company; AbeBooks, a major online used-book retailer; and Shelfari, a Facebook-like social network for readers. In April of this year, it snapped up Lexcycle, which makes an e-reading app for the iPhone called Stanza. And now there's Amazon Encore, which makes Amazon a print publisher too.
No question, Amazon is the most forward-thinking company in the book business. If there's a Steve Jobs of books, it's Amazon's founder, Jeff Bezos. His vision is defining the way books will be bought and sold and written and read in the digital world — which is to say, the world. The question is whether there will be room in it for anyone besides Amazon.
Friday, June 12, 2009
The People Formerly Known as Sources
From Mark Briggs and Journalism 2.0:
The people formerly known as sources
Posted: 12 Jun 2009 09:10 AM PDT
Earlier this week, a report of “man overboard” from a Seattle-based ferry put the local Coast Guard station into immediate action. As boats and helicopters were being launched, real-time updates were being posted to Twitter. By the Coast Guard.
This full disintermediation, when the audience can get the news and information directly from the source, is only going to increase. For journalists, an official source using Twitter is a double-edge sword: the news organization doesn’t have to wait for press releases, but the information is not necessarily unbiased nor objective. Dale Steinke, who runs the web site for King 5 News, said his team was closely watching the Coast Guard’s Twitter stream (@uscgd13) but didn’t broadcast or publish anything directly from it. (And King 5, of course, was posting updates to its own Twitter feed: @king5seattle.)
“Our newsroom treated Twitter like a scanner for purposes of our on-air and online coverage, following tweets from the U.S. Coast Guard (@uscgd13) and the Washington State DOT (@wsdot), which we verified independently before publishing,” Steinke told me via email. “We DM’d them for updates and we put callouts to our followers for anyone who was on the ferry. We also found a photo @JohnLivengood took on the ferry and we asked for permission to use it on air and online. In the meantime, we retweeted the link to it, http://yfrog.com/0kdnkj.”
Brian Forth, a friend of mine who runs a Web site building company, was one of the people who were following the developing story on Twitter and blogged about it the next day.
During the next 15 minutes, I learned that the Coast Guard had scrambled a helicopter from Port Angeles as well as a boat from Station Seattle to assist in the search. Eventually, the tweet “@All the Coast Guard is standing down from the search” was posted after learning the report came from someone that thought they saw someone in the water. Better safe than sorry, I guess.
So, what’s the point? The point is that there is a lot that could’ve happened. The fact that users were connected meant the Coast Guard could’ve asked for help, and King 5 could determine if it was worth sending a crew to report, etc.
The Coast Guard, it turns out, has an ambitious social media strategy. We often talk about the “people formerly known as the audience” (via Jay Rosen) who are now participating in reporting the news. Increasingly, journalists need to consider how to deal with “people formerly known as sources,” too.
The people formerly known as sources
Posted: 12 Jun 2009 09:10 AM PDT
Earlier this week, a report of “man overboard” from a Seattle-based ferry put the local Coast Guard station into immediate action. As boats and helicopters were being launched, real-time updates were being posted to Twitter. By the Coast Guard.
This full disintermediation, when the audience can get the news and information directly from the source, is only going to increase. For journalists, an official source using Twitter is a double-edge sword: the news organization doesn’t have to wait for press releases, but the information is not necessarily unbiased nor objective. Dale Steinke, who runs the web site for King 5 News, said his team was closely watching the Coast Guard’s Twitter stream (@uscgd13) but didn’t broadcast or publish anything directly from it. (And King 5, of course, was posting updates to its own Twitter feed: @king5seattle.)
“Our newsroom treated Twitter like a scanner for purposes of our on-air and online coverage, following tweets from the U.S. Coast Guard (@uscgd13) and the Washington State DOT (@wsdot), which we verified independently before publishing,” Steinke told me via email. “We DM’d them for updates and we put callouts to our followers for anyone who was on the ferry. We also found a photo @JohnLivengood took on the ferry and we asked for permission to use it on air and online. In the meantime, we retweeted the link to it, http://yfrog.com/0kdnkj.”
Brian Forth, a friend of mine who runs a Web site building company, was one of the people who were following the developing story on Twitter and blogged about it the next day.
During the next 15 minutes, I learned that the Coast Guard had scrambled a helicopter from Port Angeles as well as a boat from Station Seattle to assist in the search. Eventually, the tweet “@All the Coast Guard is standing down from the search” was posted after learning the report came from someone that thought they saw someone in the water. Better safe than sorry, I guess.
So, what’s the point? The point is that there is a lot that could’ve happened. The fact that users were connected meant the Coast Guard could’ve asked for help, and King 5 could determine if it was worth sending a crew to report, etc.
The Coast Guard, it turns out, has an ambitious social media strategy. We often talk about the “people formerly known as the audience” (via Jay Rosen) who are now participating in reporting the news. Increasingly, journalists need to consider how to deal with “people formerly known as sources,” too.
Books (on paper) -- The Perfect Technology
Here are words a book publisher loves to hear! Read the original by clicking here.
The Perfect Technology
by Tim Challies
About a year ago I wrote a review of Amazon’s Kindle reading device. At the time, I loved it. That was then.
A couple of months ago I traded my Kindle to a friend for a stack of old-fashioned ink-on-paper commentaries. This is now. I think I made a good trade. He is enjoying the Kindle and I am enjoying the commentaries. Win-win.
Something changed between then and now—I came to see that all of the things that frustrated me about the Kindle were things that made it not like a book. It’s book-like qualities were it’s best qualities; it’s non-book-like qualities were the ones that got to me. All of the things that annoyed me were the things that made the experience more like operating a computer and less like reading a book.
Pages took too long to turn; I could not splash yellow highlighter on the pages; I could not skim through the book looking quickly for a word or phrase or note; I could not scrawl notes in the margins. Sure, there were a few advantages—the notes I did take (saved in a text file on the Kindle) could be exported to my computer simply by plugging in a USB cable; books were less expensive and instantly added to my collection; hundreds of classics were available for free.
But overall, the Kindle experience paled in comparison to the happy, familiar, comforting experience of sitting down with a book. Everything I wanted the Kindle to do, a book could do better.
Books are the perfect technology. I’m convinced of it. This is why the Kindle experience failed me—it was an attempt to make the book better. And this is impossible to do. There is no technology more perfectly suited to its purpose than this one. In comparison to the book, any e-reader falters and fails.
Consider: I can take a book from my shelf—I have 1,000 or 1,500 within six feet of me, and it is immediately on and ready to go. There is no waiting for it to boot up and no questions about its compatibility or obsolescence. I open the book and it immediately does what it was created to do, without first needing an 8-hour charge of its battery.
I can store within that book a full history of my interaction with it not fearing that this will be lost when a hard drive crashes or when my hardware becomes obsolete. I can see every note, every highlight I’ve ever done. I can see how I interacted with that book—the parts of the book that brought me delight and the parts that brought me to despair. The pages turn instantly and are numbered for easy reference.
When I have completed the book, I can put it back on my shelf or I can lend it to another person so he, too, can read it and, if he so desires, see how I have interacted with it. Despite being printed on dead trees, there is a living quality to books that is lost on e-readers.
Though the words in each may be the same, there is more to a book than its words. A book is an experience, and the experience includes the media through which we consume those words. Reading a book printed on paper, reading a book on a reading device and listening to a recording of a book are, at least in some way, different experiences.
Since the launch and overwhelming success of the Kindle, much ink has been spilled (scratch that and replace it with “many pixels have been lit”) discussing the future of the book. For the first time, people are now turning in large numbers to a device that allows them to read books on a gizmo that is not made of dead trees (though, ironically, the manuals telling how to use said device are still printed on dead trees).
With the iPod and iPhone becoming increasingly positioned as reading devices, the chorus swells. There are hundreds of books and articles struggling to understand what it means for the word to transition from print to bits, from paper to screens. The consequences, I am convinced, are profound and I think we are prone to underestimate them.
As for me? Well, I am sure I’ll take another stab at an e-reader at some point in the future; it’s probably inevitable. But I would be awfully surprised if I ever allow such a device to become a substitute for all the ink and paper surrounding me on all sides here in my office.
Unless the e-book can become more perfect than an already perfect technology, I’m going to stick with paper.
The Perfect Technology
by Tim Challies
About a year ago I wrote a review of Amazon’s Kindle reading device. At the time, I loved it. That was then.
A couple of months ago I traded my Kindle to a friend for a stack of old-fashioned ink-on-paper commentaries. This is now. I think I made a good trade. He is enjoying the Kindle and I am enjoying the commentaries. Win-win.
Something changed between then and now—I came to see that all of the things that frustrated me about the Kindle were things that made it not like a book. It’s book-like qualities were it’s best qualities; it’s non-book-like qualities were the ones that got to me. All of the things that annoyed me were the things that made the experience more like operating a computer and less like reading a book.
Pages took too long to turn; I could not splash yellow highlighter on the pages; I could not skim through the book looking quickly for a word or phrase or note; I could not scrawl notes in the margins. Sure, there were a few advantages—the notes I did take (saved in a text file on the Kindle) could be exported to my computer simply by plugging in a USB cable; books were less expensive and instantly added to my collection; hundreds of classics were available for free.
But overall, the Kindle experience paled in comparison to the happy, familiar, comforting experience of sitting down with a book. Everything I wanted the Kindle to do, a book could do better.
Books are the perfect technology. I’m convinced of it. This is why the Kindle experience failed me—it was an attempt to make the book better. And this is impossible to do. There is no technology more perfectly suited to its purpose than this one. In comparison to the book, any e-reader falters and fails.
Consider: I can take a book from my shelf—I have 1,000 or 1,500 within six feet of me, and it is immediately on and ready to go. There is no waiting for it to boot up and no questions about its compatibility or obsolescence. I open the book and it immediately does what it was created to do, without first needing an 8-hour charge of its battery.
I can store within that book a full history of my interaction with it not fearing that this will be lost when a hard drive crashes or when my hardware becomes obsolete. I can see every note, every highlight I’ve ever done. I can see how I interacted with that book—the parts of the book that brought me delight and the parts that brought me to despair. The pages turn instantly and are numbered for easy reference.
When I have completed the book, I can put it back on my shelf or I can lend it to another person so he, too, can read it and, if he so desires, see how I have interacted with it. Despite being printed on dead trees, there is a living quality to books that is lost on e-readers.
Though the words in each may be the same, there is more to a book than its words. A book is an experience, and the experience includes the media through which we consume those words. Reading a book printed on paper, reading a book on a reading device and listening to a recording of a book are, at least in some way, different experiences.
Since the launch and overwhelming success of the Kindle, much ink has been spilled (scratch that and replace it with “many pixels have been lit”) discussing the future of the book. For the first time, people are now turning in large numbers to a device that allows them to read books on a gizmo that is not made of dead trees (though, ironically, the manuals telling how to use said device are still printed on dead trees).
With the iPod and iPhone becoming increasingly positioned as reading devices, the chorus swells. There are hundreds of books and articles struggling to understand what it means for the word to transition from print to bits, from paper to screens. The consequences, I am convinced, are profound and I think we are prone to underestimate them.
As for me? Well, I am sure I’ll take another stab at an e-reader at some point in the future; it’s probably inevitable. But I would be awfully surprised if I ever allow such a device to become a substitute for all the ink and paper surrounding me on all sides here in my office.
Unless the e-book can become more perfect than an already perfect technology, I’m going to stick with paper.
Friday, June 5, 2009
McCandlish Phillips--A Calling Higher than Journalism
Here's a WSJ article on one of my great heroes. Phillips helped us set up Washington journalism internships programs for Grace College students in the 1970s and he's stuck faithfully to his vision of recruiting and training young journalists with a Christian worldview to move into positions of authority in publishing. JUNE 5, 2009
A Calling Higher Than Journalism: Who Knew?
By PETER DUFFY
For two decades beginning in the early 1950s, John McCandlish Phillips composed elegant newspaper stories under grueling deadline pressure for the New York Times, earning a reputation as one of his generation's great reporters. In his 2003 memoirs, Arthur Gelb, a longtime editor at the paper, described him as "the most original stylist I'd ever edited."
"What kind of a day is today?" Mr. Phillips wrote at the beginning of a 1969 article on the closing of a famed Times Square eatery. "It's the kind of a day that if you wanted a slice of cheesecake at Lindy's, you couldn't get it."
He was well known among his colleagues for his lanky stature, which earned him the nickname "Long John"; his sweet temper; and his uncompromising devotion to his Christian faith. "I don't remember anybody quite like him in all my years of being around people who worked for newspapers," said Gay Talese, a fellow Timesman in those days. "Newspaper people tend to be cynical. He's the very opposite of that." In the secular temple of the big-city newsroom, Mr. Phillips conspicuously placed a Bible on his desk, calling it "a statement I made of who I was and where I stood."
Mr. Phillips stunned the staff when he decided to leave full-time employment in 1973 at the age of 46. The New Yorker magazine much later called him "The Man Who Disappeared" and wondered why a figure with so much talent would "walk away from it."
But Mr. Phillips did not disappear. He channeled his imagination into the church he had co-founded with Hannah Lowe a decade or so earlier, the Manhattan-based New Testament Missionary Fellowship, a small Pentecostal congregation. His dream was to spur a massive evangelizing campaign in New York City that would result in waves of born-again Christians.
"What everyone in this city needs, with scarcely anyone knowing of it, is the one salvation that God has provided in His son, Jesus Christ," he told me in a recent interview. "My life was changed in a moment of time, permanently, by an act of evangelism [in 1950]. I know its power. And I have no chiefer desire than to see as many individuals as possible come to that same threshold and cross it."
Last year he stepped down from the church's board of trustees, but he is still at the center of its life. He manages financial investments, answers correspondence and joins regular services, which are held on Tuesday nights and Sunday mornings in three different locations. He is a grandfatherly mentor to the "32 or 33" members, many of whom came to the church through its work on several Ivy League campuses.
The church has always been small. According to Mr. Phillips, its leaders have never been concerned with increasing membership. Rather, they "put an emphasis on growth in evangelical outreach," he said. "People who come to Christ often go in a number of different directions." From the 1960s through the 1980s, members spent much time on the streets of New York. They preached, prayed and sung in areas like Times Square and Columbus Circle. In more recent years, the church has funded evangelizing efforts abroad.
Still, public evangelism in the city remains a "very high" priority, Mr. Phillips stressed. Last Saturday, he was in Central Park, participating in an event at the Bandshell sponsored by his church called "Jesus Saves and Heals." Preaching alternated with musical performances. Bibles and religious literature were offered. A prayer station was set up.
Now 81, Mr. Phillips is still spindly -- "spectral" in his description -- although a slight stoop has brought him closer to eye level. Wisps of gray hair adorn his bald head, and his voice is colored by raspiness. Although Mr. Phillips has sermonized in New York for decades -- he is known for his professorial mien -- he did not take the stage on this day. "I don't think the people are as disposed to listening to an old wizened creature as they are to youthful vibrant persons," he said. Instead, he has placed his hopes for the ministry's public efforts on the day's main speaker, Christopher White, a Yale-educated evangelist who has led the church's efforts in Latin America.
Mr. Phillips says he is at work on a "longstanding but quite uncompleted" religious work and never particularly missed journalism. In recent years three opinion pieces of his have been published in the Washington Post. The topics included media ethics and the excessive complexity of our tax system. In 2005 he took on columnists like Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich for heaping "fear and loathing" on evangelicals and traditional Catholics. "I have been looking at myself, and millions of my brethren, . . . in a ghastly arcade mirror lately," he wrote.
Mr. Phillips admits disappointment that his great hopes for the evangelization of New York City have not come to fruition. He characterized the response at Central Park as "fairly remote." But who knows what the future holds? When it is pointed out to him that some of his best stories placed their greatest weight on the final line, he chuckles. A 1966 masterpiece about a U.S. Marine killed in Vietnam concluded with the wrenching words, "He was 19 years old."
"I don't anticipate being a prime mover of a spiritual awakening," he said. "But I greatly desire to see it, and whatever its origins is thoroughly fine with me. It will come at a time chosen by God."
---------------
In a May 4 Washington Post op-ed, "When Columnists Cry 'Jihad,'" former New York Times reporter John McCandlish Phillips, who recalled that "I was the only evangelical Christian among some 275 news and editorial employees," charged that "in more than 50 years of direct engagement in and observation of the major news media I have never encountered anything remotely like the fear and loathing lavished on us by opinion mongers in these world-class newspapers [Times and Washington Post] in the past 40 days." Asked about the allegation that night on MSNBC's Hardball, New York Times veteran R.W. "Johnny" Apple conceded to Chris Matthews: "I think both papers tend to be secular in their approach. Yes, I do. They serve largely secular audiences" and "like it or not, religious people, particularly in the Midwest, the mountain states, and the south, think that the Democratic Party is anti-religious. And, of course, they consider the New York Times and the Washington Post as arms of the Democratic Party."
Back in late March on CNN's Reliable Sources, Steve Roberts, who noted how he "worked for the New York Times for 25 years," revealed: "I could probably count on one hand, in the Washington bureau of the New York Times, people who would describe themselves as people of faith." That disconnect hurt the media, Roberts suggested, in how "there was so much attention...on the rockers and the sports celebrities who were registering voters." Roberts asked: "And how many stories did we see about that compared to the pastors and churches in Ohio who were registered ten times as many voters?" For more, go to: www.mediaresearch.org
An excerpt from "When Columnists Cry 'Jihad,'" an op-ed in the May 4 Washington Post by John McCandlish Phillips, a New York Times reporter from 1955 to 1973:
I have been looking at myself, and millions of my brethren, fellow evangelicals along with traditional Catholics, in a ghastly arcade mirror lately -- courtesy of this newspaper and the New York Times. Readers have been assured, among other dreadful things, that we are living in "a theocracy" and that this theocratic federal state has reached the dire level of -- hold your breath -- a "jihad."
In more than 50 years of direct engagement in and observation of the major news media I have never encountered anything remotely like the fear and loathing lavished on us by opinion mongers in these world-class newspapers in the past 40 days. If I had a $5 bill for every time the word "frightening" and its close lexicographical kin have appeared in the Times and The Post, with an accusatory finger pointed at the Christian right, I could take my stack to the stock market.
I come at this with an insider/outsider vantage and with real affection for many of those engaged in this enterprise. When the Times put me on its reporting staff, I was the only evangelical Christian among some 275 news and editorial employees, and certainly the only one who kept a leather-bound Bible on his desk....
The opening salvo of the heavy rhetorical artillery to which I object came in on March 24, when Maureen Dowd started her column in the Times with the declaration "Oh my God, we really are in a theocracy." While satiric, as always with the ever-so-readable columnist, it was not designed to be taken lightly....
Three days later Frank Rich, an often acute, broadly knowledgeable and witty cultural observer, sweepingly informed us that, under the effects of "the God racket" as now pursued in Washington, "government, culture, science, medicine and the rule of law are all under threat from an emboldened religious minority out to remake America according to its dogma." He went on to tell Times readers that GOP zealots in Congress and the White House have edged our country over into "a full-scale jihad." If Rich were to have the misfortune to live for one week in a genuine jihad, and the unlikely fortune to survive it, he would temper his categorization of the perceived President Bush-driven jihad by a minimum of 77 percent. If any "emboldened minority" is aiming to "remake America according to its dogma," it seems to many evangelicals and Catholics that it is the vanguard wanting, say, the compact of marriage to be stretched in its historic definition to include men cohabiting with men and women with women. That is, in terms of the history of this nation, a most pronounced and revolutionary novelty.
From March 24 through April 23 (when The Post twinned Colbert I. King's "Hijacking Christianity" with Paul Gaston's "Smearing Christian Judges"), I counted 13 opinion columns of similarly alarmist tone aimed at us on the Christian right: two more in The Post by the generally amiable and highly communicative Richard Cohen headlined "Backward Evolution" and "Faith-Based Pandering"; one by his colleague, the urbane Eugene Robinson, "Art vs. the Church Lady" (lamenting that "the pall of religiosity hanging over the city was reaching gas-mask stage"); and three by Dowd, two by Paul Krugman and three by Rich in the Times.
In "What's Going On" [March 29], Krugman darkly implied that some committed religious believers in our nation bear a menacing resemblance to Islamic extremists, by which he did not mean a few crazed crackpots but a quite broad swath of red-staters. In "An Academic Question" [April 5], Krugman, conceding the wide majority of secular liberals over conservatives on the faculties of our major universities, had the supreme chutzpah to tell us why: The former, unfettered by presuppositions of faith, are free to commit genuine investigative work and to reach valid scholarly conclusions, while the latter are disabled in that critical respect by their unprovable prior assumptions. So they are disqualified as a class from the university enterprise by their unfortunate susceptibility to the God hypothesis.
Yet most of what became the great East Coast universities (Harvard, Dartmouth, Princeton, Columbia and Yale among them) were, in cold fact, founded by men of faith and prayer for purposes that were informed and motivated by explicitly biblical principles....
In the long journey from the matchless moment when I became "born again" and encountered the risen and living Christ, I have met hundreds of evangelicals and a good many practicing Catholics and have found them to be of reasonable temperament, often enough of impressive accomplishment, certainly not a menace to the republic, unless, of course, the very fact of faith seriously held is thought to make them just that....
END of Excerpt
For the op-ed in full: www.washingtonpost.com
Romenesko ( www.poynter.org ) highlighted a mid-1990s profile of Phillips by the New Yorker's Ken Auletta. The slug line: "At one time, a whole generation of Times reporters wished they could write like McCandlish Phillips. Then he left them all for God." See: www.kenauletta.com
For a picture of Phillips: www.worldji.com
R.W. "Johnny" Apple, a veteran of the paper's Washington bureau where he served as bureau chief, came aboard MSNBC's Hardball on Wednesday night to plug his new book, Apple's America: The Discriminating Traveler's Guide to 40 Great Cities in the United States and Canada.
Host Chris Matthews raised with him the Phillips op-ed and the MRC's Geoff Dickens took down the exchange:
Matthews: "Let me talk about your newspaper. Today, in the Washington Post, somebody unloaded on the New York Times, said, his name is John McCandlish Phillips. He said your paper, and he used to work there, is anti-Christian, anti-evangelical, anti-conservative Catholic, the paper itself is."
R.W. Apple: "Well, he's talking, in fact, about, as I read the piece, about both us and the Washington Post."
Matthews: "Right."
Apple: "In terms of their columnists being anti-evangelical, anti-Catholic, anti-religious, because they claim that there's a jihad under way by the religious forces in this country. I do not believe that there's a jihad under way."
Matthews: "You believe the Times and the Post have that bias of secular bi-coastalism against the heartland of America and its religious beliefs?"
Apple: "I think, I think both papers tend to be secular in their approach. Yes, I do. They serve largely secular audiences. And I've been out around the country promoting my book. And before that, I was out on the campaign. And I have to say that, like it or not, religious people, particularly in the Midwest, the mountain states, and the south, think that the Democratic Party is anti-religious. And, of course, they consider the New York Times and the Washington Post as arms of the Democratic Party."
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Have Days of Christian Media Come and Gone?
From Newsweek:
Preacher Don’t Publish
Have the days of Christian media come and gone?
June 4, 2009 |
Another week, another failed magazine. But while the collapse of print media is hardly news, this demise is different.
Today's Christian Woman was founded in 1978 to reach evangelical Christian women who wanted a publication that reflected their values. They didn't want the crass sex talk of Cosmopolitan. They didn't want the mainstream relationship advice of Redbook. They wanted inspirational stories of faith and Bible-based help in managing their children, friendships and marriages. Anita Bryant graced the first issue's cover.
"It was as close to what people were looking for as anything," remembers its founding editor, Dale Hanson Bourke. Last week, TCW's parent company, Christianity Today International (CTI), announced that the magazine's September/October issue would be its last. "I feel like a dinosaur," Bourke moaned in an e-mail.
The death of TCW is important for two reasons. First, it shows that Christian magazine publishing is in the toilet along with almost every other kind of print publishing. In its announcement, CTI also said that Ignite Your Faith—formerly the historic Campus Life—would close, and that 22 percent of the CTI staff would be laid off. (Christianity Today, CTI's flagship publication, founded by Billy Graham in 1956, will remain in business.)
Other Christian magazines—Discipleship Journal, Pray and CCM, the Christian community's version of Rolling Stone—have also been shuttered in the past 18 months. New Man and SpiritLed Woman, published by the Charisma group, have abandoned print and are now available only online. "The perfect publishing storm that's hitting everyone is hitting us," says Harold Smith, CTI's CEO and editor in chief. "It has hammered us."
The real interest here, though, is more than merely economic. TCW's death signals something much bigger: an end in America to the perceived separation between the secular and the evangelical worlds. Not 10 years ago, the conventional wisdom as reflected in much of the mass media held that evangelical Christians led completely separate lives from everyone else. They went to separate colleges, they married each other—and they shopped at Christian bookstores, where they could purchase books, records, magazines and tea napkins produced and distributed by Christian-owned companies. Only secular people shopped at Barnes & Noble.
So separate were the two worlds that Christian bestsellers rarely showed up on the New York Times bestseller list—and when they did (as with Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins's Left Behind books), the secular media treated the authors and consumers as oddities. In December 1985 the hip, Andy Warhol-founded Interview magazine did a piece on Bourke and TCW. "It was very much a look-who-we-discovered approach," says Bourke.
Now, though, Christian and inspirational stories are widely available in secular places. O, Redbook and Good Housekeeping regularly run the kinds of articles that TCW once considered its bread and butter. On her Web site, Oprah currently features an interview with Queen Noor of Jordan, in which the queen says that she and her husband strive to raise their children "like any other family." "The most important thing," she says, "is to instill [in your children] the right values."
Barnes & Noble and Borders—not to mention Sam's Club and Wal-Mart—carry a wide variety of Christian and inspirational books, magazines and music. Even the most committed Christians no longer have to shop only at Christian stores or buy only Christian media. "I don't shop at a Christian bookstore," admits Ginger Kolbaba, the current editor of TCW. "Not when I can go online."
Even more important, evangelical Christians are less willing to identify themselves as a coherent group embodying one set of values. As a result, it seems Christians are more willing to take their parenting and relationship advice from secular sources. "This next generation, they can read a marriage magazine or a parenting magazine and filter it through their Christian world view without saying, 'I need Today's Christian Marriage or Today's Christian Woman'," says Don Pape, publisher of trade books for David C. Cook, a Christian publishing firm. "I can pick up a music magazine and I don't need a writer to say, 'You will like this because it's a Christian artist.' I can do that myself. I think that's one of the issues."
In the old days, efforts by Christian or secular companies to "cross over" into foreign turf were considered quixotic. But the popularity of the book The Shack and the music of Carrie Underwood, not to mention The Passion of the Christ and the selection of Kris Allen as America's newest Idol, demonstrate how defunct the conventional wisdom has become.
In the world of Christian publishing, as elsewhere, the successful brands are those that have found small but profitable niches. Relevant magazine, with about 100,000 subscribers, talks to young, mostly male evangelical Christians with a strong interest in social-justice issues. Its ad sales have remained steady through the downturn, as has its subscriber base, says editor Cameron Strang.
Now TCW is in the process of reinventing itself as what Kolbaba calls "a digizine": an online magazine for Christian women in their 30s interested in social justice and community action. The price of the new product—which doesn't yet have a name—will be much lower than that of the print version. But since the layoffs at CTI, Kolbaba is doing this relaunch very much on her own. Who else from the TCW staff is working with her on this project? "Actually, just me. I'm it, yeah."
You've got to love her for trying.
© 2009
Preacher Don’t Publish
Have the days of Christian media come and gone?
June 4, 2009 |
Another week, another failed magazine. But while the collapse of print media is hardly news, this demise is different.
Today's Christian Woman was founded in 1978 to reach evangelical Christian women who wanted a publication that reflected their values. They didn't want the crass sex talk of Cosmopolitan. They didn't want the mainstream relationship advice of Redbook. They wanted inspirational stories of faith and Bible-based help in managing their children, friendships and marriages. Anita Bryant graced the first issue's cover.
"It was as close to what people were looking for as anything," remembers its founding editor, Dale Hanson Bourke. Last week, TCW's parent company, Christianity Today International (CTI), announced that the magazine's September/October issue would be its last. "I feel like a dinosaur," Bourke moaned in an e-mail.
The death of TCW is important for two reasons. First, it shows that Christian magazine publishing is in the toilet along with almost every other kind of print publishing. In its announcement, CTI also said that Ignite Your Faith—formerly the historic Campus Life—would close, and that 22 percent of the CTI staff would be laid off. (Christianity Today, CTI's flagship publication, founded by Billy Graham in 1956, will remain in business.)
Other Christian magazines—Discipleship Journal, Pray and CCM, the Christian community's version of Rolling Stone—have also been shuttered in the past 18 months. New Man and SpiritLed Woman, published by the Charisma group, have abandoned print and are now available only online. "The perfect publishing storm that's hitting everyone is hitting us," says Harold Smith, CTI's CEO and editor in chief. "It has hammered us."
The real interest here, though, is more than merely economic. TCW's death signals something much bigger: an end in America to the perceived separation between the secular and the evangelical worlds. Not 10 years ago, the conventional wisdom as reflected in much of the mass media held that evangelical Christians led completely separate lives from everyone else. They went to separate colleges, they married each other—and they shopped at Christian bookstores, where they could purchase books, records, magazines and tea napkins produced and distributed by Christian-owned companies. Only secular people shopped at Barnes & Noble.
So separate were the two worlds that Christian bestsellers rarely showed up on the New York Times bestseller list—and when they did (as with Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins's Left Behind books), the secular media treated the authors and consumers as oddities. In December 1985 the hip, Andy Warhol-founded Interview magazine did a piece on Bourke and TCW. "It was very much a look-who-we-discovered approach," says Bourke.
Now, though, Christian and inspirational stories are widely available in secular places. O, Redbook and Good Housekeeping regularly run the kinds of articles that TCW once considered its bread and butter. On her Web site, Oprah currently features an interview with Queen Noor of Jordan, in which the queen says that she and her husband strive to raise their children "like any other family." "The most important thing," she says, "is to instill [in your children] the right values."
Barnes & Noble and Borders—not to mention Sam's Club and Wal-Mart—carry a wide variety of Christian and inspirational books, magazines and music. Even the most committed Christians no longer have to shop only at Christian stores or buy only Christian media. "I don't shop at a Christian bookstore," admits Ginger Kolbaba, the current editor of TCW. "Not when I can go online."
Even more important, evangelical Christians are less willing to identify themselves as a coherent group embodying one set of values. As a result, it seems Christians are more willing to take their parenting and relationship advice from secular sources. "This next generation, they can read a marriage magazine or a parenting magazine and filter it through their Christian world view without saying, 'I need Today's Christian Marriage or Today's Christian Woman'," says Don Pape, publisher of trade books for David C. Cook, a Christian publishing firm. "I can pick up a music magazine and I don't need a writer to say, 'You will like this because it's a Christian artist.' I can do that myself. I think that's one of the issues."
In the old days, efforts by Christian or secular companies to "cross over" into foreign turf were considered quixotic. But the popularity of the book The Shack and the music of Carrie Underwood, not to mention The Passion of the Christ and the selection of Kris Allen as America's newest Idol, demonstrate how defunct the conventional wisdom has become.
In the world of Christian publishing, as elsewhere, the successful brands are those that have found small but profitable niches. Relevant magazine, with about 100,000 subscribers, talks to young, mostly male evangelical Christians with a strong interest in social-justice issues. Its ad sales have remained steady through the downturn, as has its subscriber base, says editor Cameron Strang.
Now TCW is in the process of reinventing itself as what Kolbaba calls "a digizine": an online magazine for Christian women in their 30s interested in social justice and community action. The price of the new product—which doesn't yet have a name—will be much lower than that of the print version. But since the layoffs at CTI, Kolbaba is doing this relaunch very much on her own. Who else from the TCW staff is working with her on this project? "Actually, just me. I'm it, yeah."
You've got to love her for trying.
© 2009
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Spencer Pratt Baptized by Stephen Baldwin
A day after his wife Heidi led a prayer to Jesus with Patti Blagojevich, Spencer Pratt was baptized in the jungle river by born-again Christian Stephen Baldwin during "I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here." A short time later he and his wife quit the show.
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