Newsroom

There is now a site on the Internet that provides unique information to Christians as they try to make sense of the world and seek to pray more effectively.

This site also sets out, even more ambitiously, to change fundamentally the picture the public media paints of the world.

Despite appearances, and some Christian's prejudices, the average journalist is honestly striving to record the world as he or she sees it. Accuracy, fairness, balance are still highly prized in many newsrooms.

Journalists who misrepresent the world, who exclude the spiritual from the picture, don't usually do it as lobbyists for the atheist tendency. They simply describe the world as they see it.

The missing elements are due partly to a shortage of resources, but much more to a general ignorance, or lack of discernment. St. Augustine put his finger on the problem when he said that you need faith in order to understand. No wonder that the impact of faith on the way the world works is not noticed. The implications of the spiritual are not discerned.

So if we, as Christians, want to do something about it, where do we start? We live in an information society. 'News - on the hour every hour' is only the start. News information flows through each of the multitude of communication channels to which we are exposed.

Four-way news flow

There are four particular directions in which news flows that we should be concerned about.

First, there is the information that circulates simply within the Christian community. Some of the way this is presented aspires to the qualities that followers of Christ would expect. We certainly invest most of our resources in this area - with magazines, newspapers, Christian radio and so on. Let us pray for the quality to match the quantity.

Then there is the flow from the Christian community into society. A lot of work is needed here if we are not to remain characterised either by Derek Nimmo's TV cleric Mervyn Noote or the News of the World's 'Randy Vicar' stories. We cannot complain when we are misrepresented, ridiculed or ignored if we haven't understood how we are perceived and how news works in society.

A third flow of news is that from society in general into the Christian community. Again work is needed here. I fear that one large section of the church pulls up the drawbridge and lives in isolation from society; another, however, marinates itself in the attitudes of our secular society with little attempt to discern God's mind on what they see and hear. It is regrettable that the so-called Christian media doesn't tackle issues of concern to the wider society - with one or two notable exceptions!

Finally there is the flow 'out there' within the general media. Should this concern us? Absolutely! The existence of the spiritual or religious - you could say 'truth' - in society needs to be made explicit in the general media. But if so many journalists do not understand the issues of faith, their judgment will be lacking in some crucial areas. They need our help.

A virtual newsroom

Dave Adams and his colleagues in the International Christian Media Commission were particularly concerned about these third and fourth areas - which they considered the most neglected aspects of news flow. They decided one of the answers was to provide a professional facility filling the information vacuum: a way in which the journalists could be helped in their striving to understand the whole picture. Not just the odd interview, or story, on subjects that had obvious religious implications, but a broad based, in-depth, well resourced service that would be respected by the input editors of the media outlets.

The result is Worldwide Newsroom that has now been launched from ICMC as an independent web-based service.

Dave is joined by Ray Griffiths, the former editor of the Desert Sun (the city newspaper of Palm Springs in California) and David Aikman, the British journalist who was for many years the diplomatic writer for Time magazine. They are supported by stringers around the world.

Newsroom has been running a shadow service for a couple of years and has built up the beginnings of an archive that allows many news stories to be supported by useful background information. The web layout allows readers to browse through several stories on the same subject.

The new Worldwide Newsroom site was launched in November and had 9,000 visitors and over 150,000 hits in the first month. They logged in to read stories as diverse as the persecution and murder of Christians in Indonesia, the alarming incidence of domestic violence, and the UK government debate about cloning human embryos for medical research.

About 40% of the subscribers are journalists, from both the general and the religious media. Other interesting users are government and non-government agencies; for example the US immigration department, and the US government Religious Liberties Commission.

The user network is growing - three subscription requests from Indian newspapers came in during December and Newsroom is already carried by websites from Chile to Malaysia.

Two publics

Worldwide Newsroom has gone live to two publics. First, it speaks to the world's general media to deepen their understanding of the religious issues, and to enable them to correct the bias that has so often crept in.

There is also a great demand from the Christian world: from the specifically Christian media where the service is a valuable resource for their output. But it has great appeal as a prayer resource for individual Christians; to inform them of the way their brothers and sisters are living, working and being persecuted around the world. It can also help us discern the 'truth' in some of the complex issues that arrive in our homes in news sound-bites.

Several Christian organisations have arranged for Newsroom to produce a bespoke web page for their own organisation. Newsroom filters its wealth of material to emphasise the needs of the particular constituency.

For instance Prayer for the Persecuted Church supporters click on to Freedom Report, a web page on the PPC web site, but edited and designed (and constantly updated) by Newsroom. There are links from the PPC site back to Newsroom for more information.

So, if you are a journalist committed to reporting and interpreting the world to itself; or a Christian ministry wanting to ensure that those who support you in prayer and giving are more widely informed; or an individual wanting to make better sense of the world in which we live, Worldwide Newsroom could be exactly the resource you are looking for.

Maybe each church should have at least one Newsroom monitor: keeping up to date and channelling the information into the parish magazine and to the church prayer meeting. Effective prayer needs to be informed prayer.

A new way for Christians to keep up to date

Four-way news flow

A virtual newsroom

Two publics

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