I've been surprised at the excellent coverage of the Jesus All About Life (JAAL) campaign in mainstream broadsheet papers.
Fellow blogger Steve Kryger has slammed the start of JAAL at Communicate Jesus - but from a 'PR' point of view the campaign has nailed it.
The whole point of this part of the campaign is to put 'Jesus' on people's lips. So it seems churlish to complain when people start asking the hard questions.
In our fragmented culture no one slogan is going to resonate with everyone. There will always be a vocal minority that will mock church advertising - whatever the message. (Indeed research from McCrindle show that 14% of Sydneysiders do not think Jesus is a historical person but a fictional character. Yet, significantly the most common response by 42% of respondents is that Jesus is real, has miraculous powers and is the son of God.)
The aim of JAAL is to speak to the 1/3 of Australians who don't go to church but who are sympathetic to the church and believe Jesus is God.
Especially pertinent to note when critiquing the quirky poster campaign, research by McCrindle shows that over 1 in 3 Australians feel moved to pray when they are thankful for something good that has happened (34%) A similar number say they pray daily.
The report in The Australian was excellent, putting the quirky 'teaser' posters in the context of the whole campaign.
ABC broadcaster James Valentine is his whimsical way was probably the most insightful
It even made the English tabloids.
But it is telling that the best report came from the Sydney Morning Herald's former religion writer, Linda Morris.
Death of specialist journalism
The increasingly poor quality of the reporting of church life in the press is related to the decline of specialised religion writers.
Earlier this week I was at the Australasian Religious Press Association conference in Sydney
There was much discussion at ARPA about the decline of specialised religious journalism in the mainstream press.
The Sydney Morning Herald no longer has a specialist 'religion' writer. It also appears the ABC's Religion unit is also under threat.
Many take this as part of an anti-Christian mood afoot.
Others - especially conservative Christians - refuse to mourn the death of specialist religion writers because they feel they are always given the 'black hat' in conflict stories. However, I think inexperienced generalists are more likely to stick to these simple stereotypes.
Nevertheless this article from the Boston Globe puts the situation into a much more helpful context.
Given its the US, we see more clearly that the issue is not secularism per se. In a sense the internet is killing all niche journalism in the mainstream media.
The experts in fields such as education, science or health, can themselves blog in a more targeted way to their own interest groups. Likewise church leaders can communicate directly with church members more quickly and more accurately, without the need to be mediated through the mainstream press. Therefore the audience for niche writing in secular newspaper is on the wane.
Debra Mason, executive director of the Religion Newswriters Association, told me she does not believe that the religion beat is being targeted, but that all specialty beats at newspapers, including the environment, health, and education, are suffering as newspapers, with shrinking budgets, allocate an increasing fraction of their diminished newsroom staffs to general assignment jobs…
...There is a huge amount of writing about religion in new media - blogs and other online publications - some of which break news, and some of which comment on news broken by others. But much of the online work is focused on individual faith groups and is written from a particular ideological or theological perspective, which differentiates it from traditional religion journalism. At the most recent denominational conventions I have attended, bloggers and reporters for religious publications have easily outnumbered reporters for secular publications.
