Barriers to Faith Coverage (2):  What reporters wish faith groups knew about how the media works
What reporters wish faith groups knew	A workshop at the June 7-9, 1998 Faith and the Media Conference  Panelists:  Royal Orr, United Church television producer and former host of Cross Country Check-Up Alex Frame, Director of Programming for CBC English Radio Casey Korstanje, Religion Reporter, Hamilton Spectator Pauline Finch-Durichen, religion reporter, Kitchener-Waterloo Record.

I have to say that though I regularly received things from churches, synagogues and temples inviting me to talk about rummage sales and those sorts of fundraising events, I didn't very often get things from churches or synagogues or temples talking about issues or things in the news. Even though I knew that the national organizations that these churches and synagogues were part of were talking about important issues, I found it odd that the materials that the national churches were preparing weren't interesting enough for local churches to send them along to me, but that's something the churches have to deal with, I guess.

When making up my mind about what to discuss, one of the things I had to confront each morning was our director of news and public affairs, whose name is Gordon Sinclair Jr. Gord Sinclair was proudly atheistic, used to be quite open about declaring that on air and in story meetings. But like any good reporter or good editor, the thing that Gord was even prouder about was that his radio station presented its listeners with good stories and he always wanted to hear about good stories. And if at a story meeting you could convince him that it was a good story or the grist for a good discussion, whether it was about religion or faith or something else, Gord didn't mind.

When I moved from CJAD to the CBC, first as the host of Cross Country Checkup, I once remarked in a kind of smart-ass way to Mr. Redekop, the vice-president of radio, that the only taboo word I had come across at the CBC while I was there -- at that point I'd been there a few months -- was "prayer." It was a smart-ass remark because it was unfair to my colleagues because when I went into a story meeting and said, "What about doing a show on prayer," well, once I convinced them it was interesting, they were happy to go along, and we did do a program on prayer. And we followed that up with a Bible quiz, a phone-in Bible quiz, which I think worked pretty well. But these things happened because I went into a story meeting and said, "I think this is a good story," and managed to convince my colleagues.

Similarly, now that I work as a freelance writer, I work and write quite regularly for the Montreal Gazette. When I call up an editor to suggest a feature article, more often than not they like the things that I suggest that are about religion and faith. These are the stories they find interesting, as I find interesting, and if I can sell it to them, they seem to be quite happy to buy.

I mention this experience because I want to suggest to you a couple of things. One is that what ends up being covered is very much a function of the individuals who come up with the ideas in those story meetings. And if there is a journalist or some journalist or an editor or some editors who seem to be interested in matters of faith and religion, you should cultivate those people. You should suggest ideas to them. You should support them as they fight for story ideas. And when they actually get something to air or into print, you should reward them by making sure that their bosses know that you appreciated that kind of reporting and that kind of issue being dealt with, even if you don't agree with the specific take that a reporter has on a story.

But I also caution you, of course, that if you're going to play the media game and work to get yourself covered, you're not going to always like the way the media treats your story or your organization. I'm afraid that's part of the game as well.

Now that I am a TV evangelist with the United Church of Canada (Spirit Connection), I want to just finish with a couple of observations about the privileged position of working as a journalist within a church. Some of the things I say are going to sound critical, so I want to preface this by saying that this is my church, the United Church of Canada, that I love it very, very much and that I respect enormously the people who work within it and I'm proud of the church.

I became host of Spirit Connection very shortly before we embarked on the so-called Jesus controversy, when our moderator -- I should point out that our moderator was prodded by a reporter, that this wasn't necessarily the agenda of the United Church that there was so much discussion of Jesus -- when our moderator shared his views on the divinity of Christ. That, of course, started a massive amount of coverage in the press, some of it positive, some of it negative, some of it thoughtful, some of it less thoughtful. But one of the things that struck me, apart from the fact that I think our moderator did a great job of articulating how a modern person of faith thinks about Jesus and who Jesus was and what Jesus continues to mean to us, one of the things that struck me about that whole experience was how uncomfortable my church was, talking about Jesus, and how quickly my church wanted to get away from Jesus and back to issues.

Issues is where we are more comfortable as a church. We would rather talk about issues than about Jesus. In this, I don't think we're that different from other churches because even though we meet on Sundays in worship and read about Jesus, we're not that comfortable talking about him. Even though, of course, our faith is reflected in the issues that we hold up and the way we approach those issues, still we're not that comfortable talking about why we've chosen those issues or why we address the issues the way we do. As a matter of fact, the most interesting part of the experience of being host of Spirit Connection has been the experience of understanding how unbelievably difficult it is to get church people to simply say the name, "Jesus." I think that's in the process of changing, but I think it's an indication of why the media and its treatment of issues of faith is as complex and as difficult as it is because I think even the faith groups themselves aren't quite sure how to speak publicly about these things as soon as they step outside of their churches and their synagogues and their temples.

Over this past year at Spirit Connection we have worked hard at reconnecting issues with matters of faith, at re-drawing the links between what we speak about and what we believe, and we have been gratified by how well people have responded to that. And so I'd finish today by saying that if you're thinking about the relationship between faith and the media, if you're wondering about how to interact with us in the media as people of faith and members of faith groups, the best advice would be the advice in the book of Acts, that you go out into the public forums and speak boldly about what you believe. People will be amazed. It worked for Peter and it'll probably work for you.

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Alex Frame, Director of Programming for CBC English Radio
The questions I was given to answer had to do particularly with the fact that the CBC is a national organization and I was to explore questions that were particular to that. I think what you'll find for the most part is the questions that I want to deal with are probably as relevant to local media as they are to national media. There are a number of people here from CBC Radio, including my boss, so I have to be very careful about what I say here, and also the two people that produce Tapestry are here. Richard Handler and Anna-Liza Kozma are both in the room and I thought I would mention that since Tapestry has been mentioned a number of times. I also see Peter Meggs who was the host of Concern when we put Concern on the air two or three generations ago, I think. So there is a vein within CBC Radio that acknowledges the need to explore spiritual matters. Sometimes it's more to the fore than others.

As I sat here last night and again for the most part of today, and I listened to a number of comments people from faith groups were making in response to what was being said, a disturbing feeling began to bother me and it bothers me still so I may as well be blunt. I ask the question: "What is the difference between this group, the group of people gathered in this room, and Green Peace? What's the difference between this group of people and the Chamber of Commerce? What's the difference between this group of people and Real Women or the Fraser Institute?" In other words, it is quite possible to see this group as yet another single interest group that believes they're not being dealt fairly by the media. This is a common litany.

If I was with Green Peace or the C.D. Howe Institute, I wouldn't find that the least bit disturbing, but I think in the context of this gathering, I think we in the media have a right to expect a little more because of the societal responsibility that religion has. I think before I'm finished I want to get to that, but I do want to read some notes from our producers. I asked some people at CBC to help me with this presentation.

The first one comes from a producer by the name of Peter Cavanagh who works on This Morning. These are Peter's comments:

There are a couple of key things that faith groups and other people should know about the CBC.

One, their agendas are different from ours. They have a particular issue that they're obsessed with and we may well, and often do, see the issue differently. Faith groups are often convinced of the goodness or rightness of their cause and often don't see the necessity or fairness of an opposing view. Faith is often a question of pure belief. Journalism is often an exercise in skepticism. These two views of the world can clash.

Two, the person a faith group approaches may be unfamiliar with the faith in question, and the members of the faith group may need to be tolerant of the CBC staff person's lack of knowledge. Just as an expert in a particular field might have to educate the journalist, so too the faith group member might need to educate. A journalist's lack of knowledge about a particular faith is not a slight, but simply a reality.

Three, a national media operation has time and budget constraints and programming needs which are not often understood or not always understood by people outside. Faith groups sometimes have to accept that their timing and ours will not coincide.

Four, we have a particular view of what constitutes a good story and what elements are necessary in the telling of a good story. Faith groups might find this difficult to accept, but getting angry about the way we want to tell a story won't make the dialogue easier.

How could they make it easier for the CBC to do its job?

One, accept that we won't always see eye to eye.

Two, be clear about what the story is and how it is of interest to people outside the faith group.

Three, be open when we want to talk about a story and not just when they want to talk about a story.

Four, don't assume from the word go that we are biased and/or unwilling to learn. Don't assume that because we disagree that we are prejudiced.

Should they approach a national organization differently than a local operation? Of course. Local outlets have a much different agenda than we do. Our stories must, by necessity, have a broader, more universal, appeal to them even when the story is rooted in a very local incident or individual. One hopes that the quality of the journalism and the story selection and the implementation would be the same, but the focus, background and assumptions about the audience knowledge will be different.

Next, some thoughts from Richard Handler, Executive Producer of Tapestry.

Let me give you some general impressions and perhaps answer the questions more specifically.

"Faith groups" often feel they are misunderstood by mainstream media. That goes without saying. It's partly a culture split. Those who attend to the sacred try to get the attention of those who don't know what the sacred is and are suspicious of religion anyway.

Mainstream media is full of secular types. They pride themselves in their skeptical view of the world, whether true or not. Mainstream media types may believe in social democracy as a given, or in the free market, or any other idol, but often God or religion is not high on the list. They know enough about history to know that religion has been used to justify the worst sorts of atrocities and religious faith isn't open to the usual rules of evidence.

Also, in our culture religion has become a private affair and even religious people will argue that it's not entirely a bad thing. So how religious people or institutions approach matters of public policy can be a source of great confusion. The public is fearful--we don't want our public life to be dictated by Christian fundamentalists, Ayatollahs, New Age zombies or, as conservatives would say, even well-meaning soft-hearted liberal religionists. So religious types tiptoe around how noisy they should be in this society much more so than in the United States.

There is a further proviso: Some religious groups themselves have been burned by their own activities in the past and are reluctant to alienate their own constituency. Twenty years ago the grassroots Anglican congregations were angry at Sunday collections for liberation movements dictated by central church liberals. Even as "progressive" a church as the United Church still gets flack from some of its congregation when the moderator tries to come out against cuts to the social welfare state. This happened two years ago at Christmas. Being a United Church member, these conservatives say, doesn't mean they have to okay the liberal politics of the leader.

Churches and other religious institutions are as diverse politically as society as a whole. So religious leaders become gun-shy. They don't know what stance they should take and their parishioners often want pastoral care, not political advice. So religious organizations and their leaders retreat into the business of religion and do a few good works on the side. The great time of social activism in the churches and elsewhere seems to be over. Even the Catholic church knows that abortion is the law of the land, even if it's a sin. Activism becomes a private strategic affair, influencing groups, legislative committees and hospital boards.

So to summarize, when religious leaders do want a message to be heard, they know they are pitching to a secular audience where the prestige of religion has been greatly diminished. They must use secular language which dilutes their moral and religious message and they must watch their own backs because not all their co-religionists may agree with them and they realize that the mainstream media's version of a story isn't theirs.

Also, much of what used to be pitched as a moral message by religious leaders is now pitched by secular moralists such as university professors. Think of those This Morning and Gzowski forums around ethical values issues. All the guests are activists or professors or journalists, rarely a priest or a rabbi or Iman. Even the domain of the religious, the value stories, have been preempted by the secular world.

So, what should religious groups know about a national news organization? It's secular, skeptical and a hard-sell bunch who see religious groups as just one interest group among many that often doesn't do anything to earn its place in the news line-up.

How could they make it easier for the CBC to do its job? Come to terms with what it means to make news as a religious organization, which means overcoming their own contradictions and conundrums, and make the newsmaking part of the pitch firmer. Religious organizations shouldn't blame the big bad media for their own paralysis of inaction and confusion.

In conclusion, a couple of things you should know. The first is that as far as CBC Radio is concerned, we are not made up of agnostic or atheist secular liberal thinkers. There is a significant number of people, including myself, who take religion and their own religion very seriously. I'm a practicing Baha'i and have been for most of my life now and the spiritual aspect of life is critical to most of the people that I deal with on a day-to-day basis. So it is not for lack of fundamental sympathy with spiritual issues that these difficulties arise.

I would suggest it is a mistake on the part of any of us to assume that in dealing with people within the media you're dealing with a group of people who have turned their backs on spirituality or religion. It just isn't the case. That doesn't mean that they're particularly fixed on a particular religious view.

I would wrap up quickly by responding to the question from my own perspective. It is that if there's one thing that faith groups could do to make our job easier, or to put it another way, if there's one thing that faith groups could do to expand the nature of public discourse, understanding, enlightenment and wisdom, it's to expand the debate. The debate needs expansion. By that, I mean that to add one's voice to other voices that are decrying the bombing of Iraq, or to add one's voice to the voices that are already saying that we need to have the social structure turned over in order to have more sympathy and support for the poor, there are already people doing that. There are already people who are preoccupied by questions of the environment. That faith groups add their voice to this may be somewhat useful, but there are people that got there before you. You should know that. Those are the people that we want to talk to.

The area that needs exploration is the question of spirituality. It's the question of spirituality and the spiritual dimension in our lives, both privately and publicly, and there are some evidences of that beginning to happen. I think our people would deal with this skeptically, but I believe the Anglican church responded to an initiative in terms of exploring the question of spirituality in the work place recently. It tended to be a little bit less than it was purported to be, but it's an important question and it's a question that belongs to the people in this room. That's what I would ask, that you give some thought to expanding the debate. The debate, however, will not be expanded by absolutist doctrinaire statements. That closes down the debate.

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Casey Korstanje, Religion Reporter, Hamilton Spectator
I have been the full-time religion and ethics writer of the Hamilton Spectator for about the last five years. I've been a journalist for 17 years. Prior to that, I spent seven years in the RCMP and I think that's a good training background for anybody that attempts to become a religion writer.

I've had an opportunity now to listen to the deans of Canadian journalism, the lords of national media, leaders in religion and academia. You know what? Most of you are probably not going to deal with those people. Most of the time when you're going to have your stories covered by the media, it's going to be by guys like me at the local newspaper. I'm one of the soldiers in the trenches. I'm the reporter you will meet, talk to on the phone, and deal with. If your story is really big and I write it, it may make it across the country, but you may appear in the Hamilton Spectator and I may be able to tell 300,000 people about what your thing is.

I heard the leadership, both in media and religion, quote the same numbers. They talked about 88 percent of people believe in God and 12 percent of Canadians are perhaps atheists or, at best, agnostics. Quite frankly, I struggled with the idea that seems to me to be developing here as sort of an unfortunate dualism somehow that the media, all of us, fall into that 12 percent, and all of you and the rest are part of the 88 percent.

That's not true. Quite frankly, my colleagues include Roman Catholics, are Jews, are Sikhs--people of faith. I myself am a person of faith. I taught my adult Sunday school Bible class before I hopped on a plane to come here yesterday. I think you need to know that because I think that needs to tell you something about your average newsroom, your average newspaper and your average reporter out there. We're all in this together. We're all human beings together and what I do for a living -- I write for a living and that's my job, but I do have a faith perspective. Quite frankly, most of the people I work with do.

Now, I recognize that the media is able to make mistakes. We have a saying at the newspaper that doctors bury their mistakes and we print ours. Sometimes I can understand when a faith organization or a religious group approaches the media with some trepidation, so they remain distant. But interestingly enough from the newspaper's point of view, sometimes we are a bit hesitant as well to approach you for precisely the same sort of reasons. Believe me, after five years as a religion writer, I recognize that when you write about religion and you talk to people about their faith, you're dealing with core issues, deep things that inform their lives, their thoughts, their decisions, and I recognize that everything I write is read and receives often the most over-sensitive interpretation.

Now, we do make mistakes, as I said. When I was working as assistant city editor, I remember a reporter filed a story once and he was trying to make an unfortunate parallel to the Apostle Paul and he talked about the Apostle Paul being stoned on the road to Damascus. I recognize that if you do that, your story loses credibility.

So let me give you some tips about how to deal with the media. We're not always searching for the sensational to make you look bad or to focus on those things. Those things happen and we will write about them, but what is not good for you folks out there is that if your first contact with the media or with a journalist is because you're now in a damage control mode over something. If that's the first time you've talked to a reporter, you're not going to get the kind of sympathetic coverage that you want.

Let me suggest that you find out who's who at your paper and other media outlets. Find out who's working there and make a contact with them outside of the realm of getting a story done. All kinds of people have done that at the Spectator and it serves them well.

Joe Shoesmith became the new P.R. guy there for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and he just called me up one day and said, "Hey, I want to introduce myself." We had a coffee and we talked and that was fine. It wasn't about a story, but it was about me finding a contact and he and I talking and discussing some issues. I filed that away and later on, now, if I do a story, and I have done some on the Mormon churches, I talk to Joe and he directs me. We know each other and we can trust each other, so we've developed a relationship.

You heard Mary-Frances Denis earlier. Mary-Frances and I know each other and we have chatted on the phone, as I have with John Asling, who's the local United Church spokesperson. Sometimes John just phones me to say hello and sometimes we just chat about what was in the paper or whatever, without him trying to sell me a story, or me doing that to him. I have found that when the story about the moderator breaks and that sort of thing and I do in a hurry need to talk to people and need to develop some ideas, then I can call John and we can work this out. He may not always like what I print, but we have a relationship.

David Mainse is here. I once spent 18 hours with David. We wanted to get to know each other when I was on the first on the beat and he said, "Come and see me," and I did. I met him at work at five o'clock in the morning and I spent the entire day, went everywhere he went, just went with him, sat in at his meetings, watched how he ran his operation, etc., and so we have a relationship. I have a much better idea about what Crossroads is all about and who they are and what they do than the guy at the Globe that they parachute in once in a while to pick up on a story when they send someone to Sudan to buy slaves.

The ministerial associations in Hamilton have taken the time to phone our office. They get to know our publisher, they get to know our managing editor, and they get to know me, and they say, "Listen, why don't you come down and talk to us at our luncheon," and we do that. I go down and I talk to them and we just discuss what they like, what they don't like, what my point of view is, what their point of view is, and we keep a dialogue going that's outside of the realm of me writing about it 'because I don't write about the meeting. That helps me, that helps them.

Joe Couto became the media guy for the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada. Soon as he got into that job, the first thing he did was give me a call and say, "Listen, I want to come down, we'll have a cup of coffee, we'll talk, we'll meet." That's a good thing to do.

There's a little old lady I know named Agnes. She's about 78 years old; there's some dispute about her age. She is the leader of a local Baha'i assembly in Flamboro, the most aggressive public relations human being I have ever met in my entire life and she's been trying to convert me to become a Baha'i for five years now. Agnes always comes down to the paper and comes in just to say hello when she's on her way downtown. Or she brings me cookies along with her announcement of when they're going to have a fireside and stuff like that. She has given me books. Agnes has taught me about the Baha'i faith, about who Baha'u'llah is, the insides and outsides of that faith.

Now, I have studied theology and I have a background in religion, but she has taken me deeper inside that faith to explain that to me. So when a situation comes up that I want to write about or some Baha'is are arrested in Iran and they're related to local families in Hamilton, I know what I'm doing because I don't want to embarrass myself and I don't want people from the Baha'i community or any other religion community to phone me up and chew on me because I made some goofy mistake in the story. I'd rather be accurate and I'd rather be fair and I can only do that, and reporters can only do that, if we get to know you and you get to know us and we get to build a few bridges together.

I have a great relationship with the bishop of the Roman Catholic Church in Hamilton. About once a year he and I will sit down together and do sort of a state of the union interview and story. But at other times, we've just met. I know him, I know his chancery people, he's introduced me to priests around the diocese, and we have just spent some time together and talked together. That helps me because when difficult situations arise, I can phone the bishop and he knows me and I know him and we will talk. We understand each other. And then we can be accurate and we can be fair.

I am a reporter. I am also a person of faith. I'm an evangelical. I'm the worst kind; I'm a Baptist. I find that within the newsroom, the newsroom culture, that it reflects very much our social culture and these are the people you're going to meet. Most of them identify themselves as being connected to a faith group and they're not really perhaps as atheistic and as difficult as some of our leadership may paint us to be.

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Pauline Finch-Durichen, religion reporter, Kitchener-Waterloo Record
I've worked for the Record as a religion reporter since 1993, but I started by falling backwards into a freelance job in 1978. For some strange reason of misjudgment or risk, they hired me early in 1979, but not as a religion reporter, as an arts and entertainment, general culture reporter, and I ended up doing quite a wide variety of things for the next 15 years. So when I got switched through downsizing, and all the trauma that produced, into religion and doing arts and entertainment, and doing some local features, and doing a few other miscellaneous things that came along, I found myself pulled in more directions than I've ever been pulled in my life, perhaps reflecting, too, what is happening in the society of faith groups that I communicate with and as is happening in the society or culture of the print newsroom. I guess that's perhaps one of the things that qualifies me to sit here, not that I'm a rocket scientist in this medium or in this branch of the media, but that I'm daily confronted with a lot of the same challenges that any of you in the print media, either secular or church oriented or faith group oriented, are faced with.

As a reporter, one of my failings has been sometimes to get impatient with those real people, saying, "Why do 30 of them have to call me on a Monday when I'm doing my faith page for next Saturday? Don't they know I have deadlines?" Well, why should they? It's my whine. But I have to learn to listen to them when they're whining, too, when they say, "Well, you know, we never get any coverage." "When did you last call me?" "Well, I didn't, but like somebody did a while ago." So you try to work through a lot of their other agendas, a lot of their frustrations that have derived from society in general, not feeling understood, not feeling cared for, feeling definitely marginalized in some cases and, yes, feeling ignored, but not necessarily by the media or even by the particular newspaper I work for and with. They're coming from a history sometimes of outright oppression, outright persecution and sometimes just benign neglect.

On a bad Monday or Tuesday, which are my days from hell, so to speak, as far as deadlines are concerned, I have to learn to listen through that and I have to learn to listen through some of my own frustrations, knowing that I'm not going to get things in on time but, yes, is this the moment when I should stop to listen to this person instead of saying "Can you call me back Thursday when I can give you my undivided attention," as if that's more important than you giving me your undivided attention.

I tried to put a positive spin on this when I was thinking about it and I thought first of all the contact I have when I'm dealing with this question is not written. It's not something that is based on a formula agenda. It is verbal. And so I try to discipline myself or maybe risk myself in a way by saying, okay, I'm going to do this verbally. It doesn't mean I was trying to avoid writing it down, but after a while you get so sick of writing -- not of what you're writing about, just of writing, okay -- so I didn't bring my laptop, I didn't bring a lot of notes. When I did try to write some things down last night, I ended up with what sounded and felt like a Lenten litany. After each petition you say, "Lord, have mercy upon us for they will not understand."

Being a practicing Lutheran, and one day I will get it right, I do understand that it's very easy to start listing your woes and your dissatisfactions, but maybe there's a growth there. Maybe by listing a lot of the things that I wished 'why don't they' or 'why don't they know this' maybe you cut through a lot of the useless baggage and get back to the real people who are in the community who are looking to you, yes to do something for them, yes to perhaps promote their special interest group, but yet to perhaps educate and enrich one another besides, and that's the part that I have to discipline and humble myself to listen to because I'm as guilty as anyone of being impatient and getting a little pissed off at times and saying, you know, "Why don't they call me when they don't need me?" Well, do we do that, as human beings?

I did put down a few things and I'll get through some of these really quickly and see if some of these sound like what you have tried to do or what you've learned when you're dealing with the media.

I say I wish that they knew -- they being you, real people. I wish that you, real people who contact me, knew that production deadlines are real. They are real and as newsrooms continue to downsize and more of us do more beats -- like I end up doing two and a half to three beats rather than one -- I can't any longer do end runs around deadlines to get that last strawberry social in even if it's to raise money to put roofs over people's heads, to really help people. Strawberry socials are not a facetious thing any more. Anything churches do to raise money is probably pretty valid, has an outreach purpose, has a spiritual purpose, has a cohesive purpose.

I wish people wouldn't call me so late. When groups are planning an event they will have a list of 23 things to do to prepare for this event and number 22 will be call the Record. "Oh, yes, but it happens tomorrow." "Okay, I'm afraid I can't do anything. I can report on it after it's happened. How much money did you raise doing this? This is great, but if you'd told us a little sooner we might find a story inside that story that will surprise us, that will surprise you." That's an opportunity for contact and for continued contact. That's an opportunity to find out more about what your group is doing, no matter where you come from, what you're doing, what risks you're taking to do it.

Think of how much effort is put into organizing just your traditional strawberry social; there is a lot of effort. It brings people together sometimes in ways that they have never been brought together before. But when you leave the local newspaper to the second last thing you do, all that effort in perhaps allowing somebody from the outside to find a story where you didn't see one is going to be wasted. Yes, you'll have a great time in your own community and you might raise $5,000 to help shelter the homeless, but there might be a story in there that none of you knew.

As an example of not being afraid to let the paper know in time, I can remember when a dear little old lady -- we always have them in our contact books -- called me and she was just under the line. I'd sent the stuff off to be done whatever is done with; you know, the page setters do some black magic there and make it look nice on the page using these great big Mac screens that I can't handle. This little old lady calls me and I had just sent the stuff in. I say, "It's gone, it's irretrievable, it's in another world literally." She said, "Well, okay, I understand that. I'm not going to complain to you. What could I do better to let you know about this event?" I said, "Well, I don't usually get asked that question. I usually get asked other questions like, can't you just squeeze it in?" So I said, "Well, tell me what you were going to tell me, what you were going to write down." She says, "Well, I have a little trouble writing things down." She told me about an event, a minister leaving. They were going to give a little luncheon for him. It was a very nice sort of cosy thing and I said, "Well, it's probably good to report these transitions because you're a small congregation, you've been there a long time. Maybe by next week you'll know who's going to replace that person." She said, "Fine."

So the next week I get a little press release. Most of our stuff has to be done in what I call electronic printing, you know, typewritten, E-mail, fax, whatever. We don't take it over the phone any more because the opportunity for error is too great on both sides; you get numbers wrong, dates wrong, figures wrong. If it's printed, you can confirm it. So I get a handwritten page of paper in beautiful printing, very, very carefully done. You can tell it's by an elderly hand. She tells me everything I need to know and no more, just the basics. She did exactly what I said. She said, "Now we do know who our new minister will be and perhaps you could report it as just that we did this," and we do that, just little news briefs. We like to keep abreast of what's going on. Changes and transitions are important to the faith community, I have found out, and I like to respect that. Doesn't matter which faith community, what they're doing, people opening the paper tend to see patterns and trends. They see, "Oh, yeah, so and so has moved on, well, okay." That's part of the small-town aspect of our paper.

So anyway I call her back. I say, "I got your press release." I said, "I realize you don't have access to a typewriter and that you printed this out," and then I learned in the next half hour that the woman had had a stroke a couple of years ago that had left her almost totally incapacitated, she'd learned to read and write again, she'd taken memory training, she'd done all kinds of things and at this point she'd reached a time in her life when all her friends and family had passed on. She says, "My family is the church. I've got time to do things for the church. I've not very capable, but I'm going to do what I can." She taught me a lot about working not just within your limitations but beyond them and she taught me a lot, too, about perhaps sometimes confronting conventions and protocols in the paper which are done for production convenience and not for the good of the community or even for the good of the reporters and editors. And she taught that sometimes you can squeeze a little extra time or space out of editors and say, "Well, I don't think that's very interesting."

So she goes on to tell me that this church she's dealing with is 128 years old, has dwindled down to about eight members. They've been in a mission status for about 25 years and she says, "We think we have a role in that community and we're going to survive." They're doing it not by inreaching and saying, "How can we survive as this little closed group of people," but by going out and doing things. They work at the food bank, they work at the soup kitchen. This entire congregation was involved with things. I have a story now evolving out of a missed deadline because this woman took the time to do it.

That probably encapsulates, instead of a whole litany of what I wish people would do, the persistence and the passion of people who will call me up and say, "I know I'm too late for this, I know I haven't fulfilled any of the criterion you give us in your little how to reach the reporter box, but I think I have a story to tell and do you have time to listen?" And yes, we do. If we say that we don't, we're either not following our vocation or perhaps not listening to what the people are really saying. You can't listen to the fact that there's just another event coming along and there's just another bunch of people doing volunteer work and that there's just another bunch of people trying to survive, but cumulatively there are a whole bunch of stories about people's faith and persistence and passion and enthusiasm that they don't talk about themselves but you start hearing in their whole demeanor and in the way they contact you.

And then when you hear, "Well, I didn't want to contact you 'cause I didn't think it was important enough, I'm not important enough, I didn't think you'd be interested," then you have to start reassessing what gave them the idea that you wouldn't be interest. Well, sometimes everything we do in the way we leak it into our voices -- it's called emotional leakage; I don't know if you've heard that in the business world, but when your tone on the telephone says, "Oh, there's phone call number 30 today, do I really need that?" So I guess when I say why don't they or what I wish they would do is try hard -- and it is an uphill battle -- try hard to get rid of the baggage of any past rejections, any past disappointments, and just like many of the mainline denominations are trying to revise their whole space on earth and their whole mission and their whole relationship with one another, try and revision your relation to the media, particularly the print media, and say, "Okay, let's start again. What did we do wrong, both of us? What could we do right? Let's look at the glass being half full, as is often said. Let's start from a place where we've got something to work with."

We may not have a story out of every contact and if you can live with the fact that not every contact with me or any other reporter will result in a story but will result in connections, in resources, then perhaps you'll see, farther on down the line, that you do build up that critical mass of interest, of passion, of engagement, and all of a sudden I run across an issue and I'll say, "I remember I talked to Jane Doe about six months ago; I wonder if she's still the media liaison for that group. I wonder if she's still working for that church. I'll call her. She's probably got something to say about that." And sure enough, I've rarely been disappointed. I mean my contact book looks like chaos. I have people like John Asling filed under four different things; I have people like Ken Ward filed under four different things; I'm beginning to have other people filed under four or five different things. Why? Because of the quality or frequency or type of contacts I've had. I know that certain people can help me out in a crisis and have the authority and intelligence and insight to do so, and I know that other people are not geared to do that. So I learn that about them, they learn that about me.

I guess maybe the other thing that we all have to learn about each other is that none of us have unlimited power to do what we think the other should be doing. I don't have unlimited power to determine what a story looks like in the paper or how the photo caption or the headlines are going to look. I can have some limited input in how a story is edited in terms of what's taken out or left in, but mainly once I've done a story I have to trust to, again, higher powers as well and sometimes it calls for understanding and sometimes it calls for me calling up and saying, "Well, it didn't turn out quite the way we had hoped it did, but my editor saw something else, another issue that I hadn't anticipated, and my editor is also dealing with keeping many, many balls in the air as well."

So I think it's a case -- it may sound cliché -- that does call for continued climate of creative understanding, not just tolerance, not just saying, well, okay, the media are out there and we have to do what we can to get our voice in the media, but look at names and faces, be fearless in calling up and asking the dumb questions like "Who is the religion reporter?" I'm not going to say, "Well, we've had one for five years and it's been the same person." I'm going to say, "Yes, we have one." Either I'm it or someone else is it.

People are afraid to call up with the dumb questions but I have to ask them the dumb questions, too, so let's start with dumb questions and get some intelligent answers. I worry about when I get dumb answers; that's what I really worry about. Sometimes intelligent questions do get dumb answers. Sometimes I give those dumb answers. I'd rather be the one asking the dumb question and really being enriched by some of the answers I get and some of the challenges I get, some of the feedback I get. So when you start this relationship, then when you have feedback to give to a reporter you can say, "I've talked to that reporter before" or "I've talked to that reporter's editor before, I've talked to that newspaper before, I've talked to five reporters in order to get to the one that I wanted to find, but at least I found that one." Okay, now I can do feedback. And all of a sudden then you've got dialogue going because if it's just a monologue with somebody proselytizing to me or trying to convert me to a point of view so that I would write, then it's not going anywhere. If I'm just scolding them for not reading that we have a two-week deadline for coming events, I'm not doing anything either. So instead of scolding, we have to encourage. Instead of proselytizing and berating, we have to educate and enrich. I think that's the only thing that keeps me in this job, is that I get educated and enriched daily. I am humbled daily by how much I don't know about what I'm doing.

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