Culture
According to the General Social Survery, confidence in religious leaders is at an all-time low. Or to put it a different way, used car salesmen and members of Congress need to slide over and make room for us because only 20% of Americans (that's 1-out-of-5) have a "
Culture
Tuesday I head to Knoxville to participate in an unusual event for a Baptist preacher. I'll be a roundtable discussion leader at A Public Conversation on Web Journalism. Other speakers include local newspaper editors, executives from the media giant Scripps (HGTV, Food Network, etc), and other online creators
Leadership
Tim Avery at Christianity Today's Off The Agenda asked me to write an article on the way small churches are viewed by others. The result is Small Churches Need a Brand Revival, and I hope you read it. Here's how it starts: After the presidential election,
Congregation
"Students don't want to serve in the local church when they graduate; they want to do something more exciting." -- Southern Baptist seminary administrator A prominent seminary administrator made that comment to me several weeks ago. I've been rolling it around in my head
Creativity
"People today are going to stay connected forever," says Jeff Jarvis. Jarvis, journalism professor and author of What Would Google Do? made that observation in a talk to Google employees recently. Jarvis's point is that Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Plaxo, FriendFeed, Twitter, Flickr, and a host of
Congregation
A probing question companies ask themselves in planning is, “What business are we in?” You might think it would be obvious that a newspaper, for instance, is in the print news business. But, not so, according to a popular journalism blogger. Steve Yelvington says that newspapers are in the business
Congregation
Jeff Jarvis, journalism guru and author of What Would Google Do? quoted from my post The Future of Churches: A Network of Niches. Needless to say, I'm honored and thrilled. Jarvis is one of the prophetic voices who warned of the decline of newspapers when everyone else was
Congregation
In the on-going debate "will digital replace books?" the conclusion of many media watchers is an unequivocal Yes and No. Amazon's Kindle has really become a game-changer, delivering books within seconds of purchase via Sprint's wireless network. Problems do exist, as Jeff Jarvis points
Culture
Another newspaper closed last week and more are on the way. Print journalism is dying faster than the dinosaurs did, and for the same reasons -- the climate changed. Not the atmospheric climate, but the social climate. TV ditto, and throw in retail while you're at it. What
Culture
Today Amazon delivered my copy of Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road from the Late Teens through the Twenties by Jeffrey Jensen Arnett. A research professor of psychology at Clark University, Arnett became fascinated at the different choices 18-t0-20-something year olds were making compared to preceding generations. Further research bore out
Culture
The buzzword in marketing now is "conversation." The Cluetrain Manifesto popularized that idea with its statement that "markets are conversations." The authors describe a dialogue between marketer and consumer, not just the old one-way deal -- we make it, you buy it, that settles it. Now
Congregation
Newspapers must either change or die in this new media age, and churches could learn something from them. My friend, Jim Stovall, teaches journalism at the University of Tennessee, and sees the death of newspapers as a positive development for journalism. Does that sound strange? Jim sees it this way: