What the papers didn't say.
I see Stephen Bates is still at it …the now non-religious correspondent is on page 2 of today’s
Grauniad sounding off about the Archbishop of Canterbury and claiming he has been thrown into a political controversy thanks to his remarks in a Muslim magazine. You have to get three quarters of the way through the piece to discover that this political controversy amounts to a blogger in America called Katherine who didn't like what he reportedly said. Gosh. Rowan must be worried.
Guardian editors were, of course, probably a bit piqued to see the story on the Sunday Times’ front page when it had been totally missed on Saturday’s Guardian or in Sunday’s Observer, its sister paper. We know SB doesn’t think much of the ABC but the worst he does here is accuse the ST of selective reporting. Gosh again. The Grauniad would never do that. (I like it really.)
I was doing the
Sunday Paper review on the newly crowned local radio station of the year yesterday. Yes
BBC Radio Leeds has won the award again for its lively and informative approach. Whether the slot from 8am to 8.30am was lively and informative I leave the listeners to judge but we certainly romped through seven or eight stories including both of the main religious stories – the Archbishop of Canterbury, and more interestingly the one on the front page of the Sunday Telegraph about Tony Blair and his decision not to go pubic on his faith because people would think he was a ‘nutter’.
Richard Staples was also keen to talk about Borders and their ‘O Come All Ye Faithless’ cards (see previous blog), and I found I had revised my views a bit. As an ironic commentary on Richard Dawkins and his dismal faithlessness, the cards have grown on me a bit. I’m seeing them now as a bit of a send-up, knowingly and humorously shooting themselves in the foot – though that’s after I’ve had time to think about them and discuss them on the radio. Maybe I’m being a bit too sophisticated.
Still trying to get my Power Point presentation together for the gathering of DC’s (Diocesan Commmunicators) in London on December 6th. I’ve been searching the interweb for hours in an attempt to get hold of the excellently produced Caritas TV adverts to download, but so far nothing. I did however manage to download, edit and embed an interview with the head of the
Vatican website, a Sister Judith Zoebelein. Remarkable woman - she has been in that post since 1995. Ive had to keep it to a minute or so, but if you watch the whole thing
(see it here) its quite funny
when they get onto the subject of Second Life – clearly some confusion, not helped by the French student who is asking the question but quite enlightening.
The website itself still looks like it did ten years ago and appears to have been created in the dark ages, and with a staff of 17 (‘not enough’ according to Sister Judith) you’d think they’d have done something about the design. Several people I met in Rome were a bit despairing of the site, but although it's a bit dull on the outside, it's quite sophisticated once you get into it. Sort of like the Da Vinci Code in reverse.
Labels: archbishop of canterbury, guardian, radio leeds, sister judith zoebelein, stephen bates, sunday times, vatican
Oh Come all ye Faithless
The Churches Advertising Network (CAN) will be bringing out its posters and radio ads very soon, celebrating Christmas and getting people to think about the Christian faith. But in a reversal of the old Salvation Army motto, ‘why should the Devil have all the good tunes?’, they’ve been pipped by the opposition this year. The anti-Christ, Richard Dawkins himself, author of ‘The God Delusion’ along with his devilish hordes, the Borders book chain, hav
e cleverly scooped this year’s award for the best Christmas campaign, or rather, anti-Christmas campaign.
Of course it’s wrong, wrong, wrong on so many levels! ‘Faithless’? … Militant, fundamentalist atheism is a faith like any other, dependent on a belief that the human race with all its wonders, it’s incredible sense of self- understanding, love, poetry and music, is as much a cosmic accident as a chunk of rock circling Saturn. The adherents of this faith are completely confident that death is the end, that life has no meaning, that matter came about by chance.
A Christmas PR campaign for a book that would like to see the end of Christmas? I’m sure it’s done with a touch of irony (though possibly, I fear, an irony lost on the staff at Borders.) However, if Christmas is a delusion, then linking a campaign with this worldwide festival is also dishonest. Those of us with doubts, those who are agnostic, even the less militant branch of the atheistic persuasion, would all probably admit that the world would be a duller place without festivals like Christmas, and Borders certainly know they would be out of business without their Christmas stocking fillers and the season of goodwill to all.
Wrong, too, from a PR point of view. As CAN has discovered in the past PR campaigns that miss the mark can backfire dangerously. Would Borders have dared bring out this campaign poking fun at Divali, or Ramadan? Hardly. Dawkins is against those too, of course, as he is against anything which cannot be proved by science. Watch out for the backlash.
Labels: Borders, Christmas, Dawkins, O Come All Ye Faithless, PR
Meanwhile, in the provinces ...
If it had been in London it could have been a national news story. As it was, inviting Lord Adonis the schools minister to the beautiful, but 'north of watford' Rudding Park in North Yorkshire (where?) to deliver his important message, and on the day the BBC turns everything over to Children in Need, was probably a tactical mistake from a press point of view. He might sound like a Greek god (apparently his dad was Greek) but he might as well have been delivering a postcard.
Never mind, the local press would be on hand to cover it. Ah yes, the local press, with their unerring nose for news, their teams of reporters ready to move out at a moment’s notice. Is that Porky the pig flying overhead?
To be fair it wasn’t all plain sailing at our end. The Education Team were unwilling to let reporters cover the event, and then Andrew Adonis did a runner back to the metropolis and civilisation after coffee even though it had been fixed up for him to be at a lunchtime photocall. Ever felt like your pushing treacle up hill?. Mind you, had a nice chat with Ashley Peatfield, head of religion and ethics for BBC regions who recorded a few other people and got a free lunch as compensation for the early departure of the Lord and the late arrival of the MP (Phil Willis).
BBC Radio York couldn’t spare anyone to cover the event and had lost the press release I’d sent not 16 hours earlier. Brilliant. The cuts are already biting it seems.
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The Church Times continues to disappoint. Three stories sent to them last week. Bishop out on the streets with clubbers should have been of interest. Read all about it at
http://www.riponleeds.anglican.org/. But not in the Church Times. Problem is the events were all in Leeds or North Yorkshire. Silly me. Not London you see. (At the Daily Telegraph meeting in London I keep harking back to, one journalist (who shall remain nameless) kept calling the rest of the country the Shires. The Shires!!!???? I ask you!)
Anyway, in the 'consistently disappointing Church Times', an interesting article by former religious producer Ted Harrison talking about the end of the BBC Empire as we know it and life without the license fee. Totally agree with his opening analyses. I’d only been talking at lunchtime with Ashley Peatfield about the way Manchester’s religious department was badly hit by these latest cuts, how it was losing its skilled TV producers and how religion was still being pushed to the edge of the schedules.
Not entirely sure though about Ted Harrison's suggested solutions. He recommends that when the BBC inevitably loses the license fee it should stagger on with pay-to-view programmes - like pay-to view choral evensong (really?) as a way of avoiding nasty religious tv programmes from the States. Well yes, but instead of looking at the worst of religious TV, how about looking for a change at some of the excellent stuff being produced by all digital stations like
SAT2000 in Italy. Kick started by the Italian bishops conference ten years ago, it’s now consistently in the top ten TV stations in a country of digital TV and scantily clad, dumbed down wall-to-wall entertainment programmes. It produces hourly news, documentaries, debates, discussion, entertainment comedy, satire, youth and religious programmes with an underlying ethical stance, family values and a generally Christian viewpoint, but with slick professional high production values and without shoving doctrine down its viewers throats. It's not pay-to view. It carries (steady lads) adverts. Yes commercials. Ok, SAT 20000 is so popular that they can afford to be picky and have ethically vetted adverts. As someone asked, only a few weeks ago at the annual church communicators conference, what price CofE TV? The answer: - probably not as much as we think.
Labels: BBC cuts, Church Times, education, Lord Adonis, TV
Its the future!
At the recent Church Communicators conference in Ipswich we had a spellbinding presentation from Alan Rosenfeld, Apple’s UK and Europe Head of Design and Print. I’m still reeling, as I think all of us were, from the information and predictions of the future. Not least, in relation to my sabbatical study in the summer, is the way in which the Internet is becoming more and more important, as older forms of media like newspapers have to completely reassess the ways they go about their core business: news. Graphs and video clips assail us during the hour long presentation. We watch journalists on the Washington Post using Apple’s Final Cut software (other brands are available) as they decide which form of media suits a particular story… some appearing in newsprint, some as video reports on their website. Video journalists voice up films taken by Washington Post camera operators. ‘Your story through any medium’ is the watchword. Lots of useful stuff too about packaging stories to be more suitable for different media – iPods, phones, laptop computer, high definition TV, etc.. Mr Rosenfeld draws some handy analogies with the Church, and illustrates how the basic news has to be repackaged to suit the new media. Fascinating.
A few weeks later and two things have happened back in the real world. The iphone has arrived and I feel like I’ve travelled back in time. It was July 1st in New York that I first had a go of an iphone (show off), and yes, it’s quite impressive, but very fiddly for things like text messages. Plus you have to pay extra for the SatNav software and, of course downloads from iTunes. The only thing I wanted from the Apple Store that evening was a pair of Bose noise cancelling headphones. Unfortunately, I don’t think at £285 a pair they’ll even make my Christmas wish list!
The other thing that linked to the Apple talk, was the visit some of us made to the new Daily Telegraph newsroom and offices off Victoria which I refered to in the last posting. It’s claimed that the Telegraph newsfloor is now the largest in London and it’s
impressive. All the different sections fan out like spokes on a wheel from a central hub where editorial meetings can take place. Flat screen computers everywhere, giant screens hanging from the ceiling, and everyone, even feature writers in the Sunday telegraph supplements, somewhere to be found in the vast space. And yes, there in the corner, almost an afterthought, and clearly not fully understood by the hardened newsmen who are rather disparaging, are a couple of little video studios. Despite the Telegraphs undoubted good sales, those little studios could have taken over the whole of the Victoria building in twenty years time –certainly if Alan Rosenfeld is anywhere near right.
One more idea from the Daily Telegraph for the Lambeth Conference planners. How about having the Archbishops around a central table, with the bishops on tables according to the various provinces fanning out along long tables like spokes of a wheel? Well, it works at the county's biggest selling broadsheet.
Labels: Apple, Church, Internet, iphone, Lambeth, Telegraph
Religious journalists
Journalists are funny people. Stephen Bates of the Guardian keeps writing to me. Generally along the lines of ‘I’m no longer the Guardian’s Religious correspondent -please don’t send me any more of your religious press releases’ and then ‘As requested earlier, please remove me from your distribution list - send it to Riazat Butt instead’, followed by ‘Look I asked you before, I won't ask you again. I don't want any more religious stuff - I've had it up to here with religion’. Well, along those lines.
So yesterday I duly got round to amending my distribution list and sent Stephen an apologetic note. Imagine my surprise then, not ten minutes later, when I turned to page 3 of the said organ to read 'Former PM to be accepted into the Roman Catholic Church' by Stephen Bates. Call me old fashioned .....
To be honest I don’t know why I ever bothered in the first place. As far as I could make out the Guardian only ever had about four stories which it repeated every week. Obviously Tony Blair becoming a Catholic which has now been happening for at least eight years, yawn. Then there’s Gay clergy, women bishops and most important the Imminent Break up of The Worldwide Anglican Communion – a body which most of our parishioners don’t even know existed in the first place. The Guardian generally takes the stance that God doesn’t exist and the church is an irrelevant minority occupation by a few harmless old folk and the Anglican church a minority of a minority. Despite this Stephen somehow managed to convince his editors that this Imminent Break Up of the Worldwide Anglican Communion story was so important that they should let him end his religious tenure on a high note, paying for him to go to New Orleans and watch the US bishops eat the Archbishop of Canterbury for breakfast, carry out a few gay blessings and then split from the rest of the ‘stick in the mud’ Anglican communion for good. As it happens, none of the above took place. It must have been a terrible disappointment.
Oddly, if you asked him as we once did, why his stories where always so negative, his defence was that actually his wife was an evangelical Christian and he only had the good of the church in mind. Ho hmmm. You could imagine the conversations at home,‘Darling I’m back from my bible study at Doreen’s house’. SB,‘Any arguments? – any dissenting views?’ Mrs B ‘ No Doreen led a very good Bible study – and we all seemed to agree.’ SB ‘A woman leading a Bible study?! Do my ears deceive me?!! There must have been a few rumbles of discontent about that. Did anyone walk out? I need to phone the Vicar’ and so on…
But that’s journalists for you, and who can blame them. I took part in a visit to the new, and breathtaking, Daily Telegraph offices in Victoria last week with a group of church communicators and it was a superb day. Well organised and a chance to hear from some religious journalists including Jonathan Petre of the Daily and Jonathan Wynne-Jones of the Sunday Telegraph. I almost felt sorry for them. The way they have to convince their editors that they have a story so important and sensational that its got to be included, that if you include it newspapers will be flying out of the shops… and then spend hours working on it while watching it drop down the batting order until its finally kicked into touch. It’s no wonder that at every stage of this process the original story gets a little bit sexed up, a bit more sensationalised until black is white, day is night, the Worldwide Anglican Communion has become a huge and important and real er thing which is about to explode causing global warming and the end of the civilised world as we know it. Keep at it guys – it might still happen.
Labels: Anglican Communion, Archbishop, guardian, journalism, splits, tony blair
OK I'm back.. sorry for the one year gap. At a seminar recently I learned that a year is a bit too long between entries. Two or three days is better.
So I promise to be a bit better at blogging from now on.
It's great and amazing! And apparently several hundred people read it.. or may one person read it several hundred times. I could cheat and put it all on here, but instead here are some of my favourite bits..
Extracts from my Blog - Study Leave May 13- August 13 2007
... May 16 - Il meo compleanno (My birthday) Rome :
I stroll through the crowds to the Gregorian University and Jacob introduces me to Prof. Andreu Rocha Scarpetta who is leading the seminar on media and ecumenism. Having started to see the way different churches and traditions come together in Rome, this proves to be a fascinating, slightly mind-blowing seminar. Andreu is extremely helpful, discussing with me in English what he will be talking about in the seminar (which is of course in Italian), then in a break after an hour coming over to see if I was keeping up! Which I was, thanks to the power point presentation, and the subject – a detailed and fascinating study of the different strands and development in Protestantism, given to an entirely Catholic audience. Students again from many different countries where relations with protestants can be lukewarm at best, and sometimes antagonistic. But Andrew’s approach, using a model developed by Rodney Stark, is to develop understanding and empathy for different approaches. He confides that he is most worried when Catholic ‘fundamentalists’ refuse to entertain the subject and consider all protestants beyond the pail. By the end my brain is hurting from learning more about my own background than I had heard in years of experience and theological study – better still I can read more at my own pace because Professor Rocha Scarpetta has given me the password to all the course notes.
I come reeling out into the daylight and wander around Rome before ending up at Travestere. Its here on a Tuesday night that the St Egidio community meet (
http://www.santegidio.org/en/index.html) and I catch the second half of the
Tuesday night prayer and singing in the beautiful setting of the Basilica of Santa Maria. After I discover Tony and Benjamin from earlier in the day, along with some guys who have just flown in and Leonardo a member of the community for the past ten years who is showing them around. They invite me to join them for pizza at a nearbye trattoria, where in a mix of Italian and English Lonardo tells us about the St Egidio community and his love of baseball in equal measure. It seems only civil to offer to buy a round to celebrate my forthcoming Complianno (birthday) – see picture gallery!
To top off the day Leonardo offers to take me back to my hotel on his scooter – the ultimate Rome experience. There are moments as we weave through the traffic when I wonder if I will reach my next birthday, but it’s a great way to see the city. Even with your eyes closed.
May 21
Saturday is a day off so when in Rome do what the Romans do—head out of town to the Lido, buy a towel and a beach bag, hire a sun lounger on a suitably fashionable section of beach - surrounded by a lot of flesh - fall asleep, get burned, eat cannelloni, drink un birra, back to Trastevere for the evening, eat ice cream catch the 8pm St Egidio communion service, a pizza, and finally collapse into bed for a solid 8 hours sleep before Sunday.
May 24
Courses at the Greg (Gregorian University Faculty of Social Communications ) cover media and theology with a scope and depth that is the envy of the world – the small world of media theology practitioners anyway.
What’s unique here in Rome, is that the students being trained are either priests or lay people who have a clear intention to become Communications officers/directors of one sort or another back where they were sent from. Between classes today I meet an Indian priest, sponsored by his diocese to take a three year course enabling him to join an already established communications team on his return. Three years?! Three days would be our limit in England, I suspect. It’s the same with all the students, and today is for me an object lesson in how Roman Catholic Communications policy is developed and put into contexts in different cultures throughout the world.. yes, its Pastoral Communications Day. (Da,Dah!)
After another Guinness based lunch at the Trinity College Bar (where I note they will be screening tonight’s Champions League final), and a stroll through the Villa Borghese gardens where I read a book in the shade of the pine trees, its back for another Pastoral Communications class, this one led by Jacob Srampickal himself.
It’s clear I should have been to more of Jacob’s classes. He leads them with a relaxed jocular style, leading the discussions with humour but sharp and insightful comments, and the third year students, many about to return home, are open and friendly. This time its about parish strategies and Luis from Brazil presents his ideas – in Portuguese, of course. But although there’s lots of good stuff, Jacob picks him up for looking at wider issues of small groups and internal communication, with not enough emphasis on external and media strategies.
Well - loads more of course but its back to the present next time.
when they get onto the subject of Second Life – clearly some confusion, not helped by the French student who is asking the question but quite enlightening. 
