Opinion and commentary are easier to write than news and analysis. It looks the bold, courageous role: the man or woman with a take. Maureen Dowd. George Will. Jim Rome: “Have a take. Do not suck.”

But I can’t shake the feeling that the greater value for our time is provided by the reporters whose stock and trade is sources, facts, and analysis. That work feels far more difficult–more time intensive, more constrained, more risky, even.

I’ve started paying attention to the bylines in the news stories I read and to follow those writers on Twitter. It’s giving me a greater appreciation for the long body of work these reporters are producing and the amount of that work that must never make it to print.

Here’s three you could follow starting today:

Nobody knows more about health care policy than Sarah Kliff (Vox).

Nobody understands labor issues better than Noam Scheiber (The New York Times).

Nobody can explain the Syrian conflict better than Raja Abdulrahim (The Wall Street Journal).

Follow reporters on Twitter. Buy subscriptions to the papers that employ them.

 

 

I think this takedown of fictional journalist Rory Gilmore is pretty funny (“When you are interviewing a source, do not fall asleep as he’s talking to you”). I find it timely, given the furor du jour over fake news and the inability of large swaths of the populace to identify it.

[sidenote: it seems just as plausible that we are unwilling, not unable, to sniff out fictional reporting, so long as that reporting comports with the story we’re already telling ourselves about the world. But for today’s post, let’s focus on ability]

I used to have nasty altercations with a relative over articles she would post on Facebook that said positively D’Sousa-esque things about Barack Obama. My go-to response was to point out the unreliability of the source. World Net Daily and Christian Post are not conventional news gathering and reporting operations. The Presbyterian Layman is a sloppy advocacy tool. Reading a single story confirms those assertions.

Yet my family member’s response was routinely that my sources for information were just as biased. That my sources–public radio and a small sampling of daily newspapers–employed trained reporters who were bound by conventions of non-editorial journalism seemed completely lost in the argument.

This is how the “Lamestream media” attack has actually done the public a great disservice, by obscuring the razor sharp distinction between a news story and a piece of advocacy masquerading as news. I learned that distinction as a 10th grader, in a class called “Journalism.” The class was a prerequisite for joining the school paper. In today’s media environment, though, perhaps Journalism needs to be part of every school’s core curriculum.

That course would teach the most basic conventions of news reporting with the aim of cultivating media consumers who can recognize garbage. For example:

If a story lacks a byline, it’s not a news story. Anonymous content is almost always opinion.

If a story does not contain at least one quotation from a source who is either named or cited as unnamed for a plausible reason, it’s not news. News quotes sources.

If all of the quotations in a story are from the same source, or if they all support the same point of view, it’s not news. News reporters represent differing views of the events they’re covering. They talk to multiple people. All the time. That’s what they’re paid for.

There’s plenty more, but teaching just these three as starters would equip readers to detect with minimal difficulty pieces that are intentionally deceptive. That’s a start, right?

What is the most important thing your youth ministry does?

A parent asked me yesterday to prioritize for her student the various upcoming trips and retreats. Should he go on the ski retreat? Or the Jr. High retreat? Or the Confirmation retreat?

So I’m thinking about that. It’s challenging, because I don’t think of these things in terms of rank importance, but rather in terms of value for particular students for particular reasons. I’ve embraced a more-is-more kind of strategy that multiplies the opportunities for youth to go on trips and retreats, knowing that no student will go on all of them. Each one aims to be a unique experience of community and faith formation.

But I haven’t communicated that philosophy to parents, and so of course all the trips and retreats appear on the calendar as equally weighted.

I need to start narrating what these different opportunities are. It’s not enough to stick them on a calendar.

People keep saying it: caring about what you do makes all the difference in the world. It makes a difference to you, but it also makes a huge difference to the people around you. Working with people who are motivated more to make a positive impact than to advance themselves is fun; some days anything feels possible.

Caring is risky, though. Some environments discourage caring by fiercely protecting the status quo. If we’re not willing to go along when colleagues want to try new things to make improvements, it will remain difficult for them to care very much about what we’re doing.

I have had the great benefit for most of my career to work with people who care a lot about what they do and who encourage me to care just as much. I see it now–that has been invaluable.

Editing is where you make your money. Moving this paragraph before that one, taking out that superfluous use of “incidentally,” cutting that last sentence entirely. The fun part of writing is the editing.

But if you’re not writing, you won’t have anything to edit.

So start writing.

I’m fooling around with the structure of 8th grade Confirmation, because the structure I inherited is too good for me. It contains years of organization and established processes that reflect deep thinking. The team of volunteers know it and can faithfully lead it.

And here I go tinkering with it.

The major tweak is to give myself more face-to-face time with students in the form of bi-weekly salon-style lectures on topics extracted from the Brief Statement of Faith. In odd weeks, then, I’m preparing conversation guides for the volunteers and their Circle Groups. It’s not a perfect system. Yet. It’s not even one I intended to design.

Last month I designed a session on The Crucifixion that followed our conventional pattern: 20 minutes of introductory remarks from me followed by 30 minutes of Circle Group discussion. But 10 minutes into my time students started asking questions. Some back-and-forth ensued, and when my time was up I hadn’t covered half of what I needed to. So, on the fly, I decided to push the Circle Group discussion to the following week and spend the rest of the hour mixing it up with 8th graders about Jesus’ death.

It was fun. So for yesterday’s Resurrection discussion, I planned mostly Q&A. I put a simple guide (below) together using Kim Fabricius’ “10 Propositions on The Resurrection,” and off we went. It wasn’t flawless; it took into the third or fourth proposition for students to take the bait and start asking questions. But once they did the rest of the time flew, and with interesting stuff. One of them offered the concept of zero gravity as an analog to proposition 4. Another refuted that. Fun.

But not for everyone. As with all curriculum, the approach resonates with some, not all, participants. The challenge is to introduce elements in subsequent sessions that draw on different aptitudes and intelligences: kinesthetic, verbal, etc. But it feels better right now to build those in week-to-week and to not attempt to represent all of them in every session.

This doesn’t work without those volunteers’ willingness to adapt what they’re used to doing. That’s a big ask. This is an already intensive program that demands loads of time and energy from adult leaders. If this is too disruptive for them, I’ll have to take that seriously.

This is what technology can do.

Day: Thursday, November 17th

Time: 4:36 pm

Place: The Red Line train from Chicago Avenue to Belmont; the Brown Line train from Belmont to Western

Medium: Facebook Messenger

Object: A colleague and friend who occupies a similar position to mine in a similar church

Subject: Work

Details: I interrupted him on my commute home with a flurry of pronouncements. He, ever so gracious, asked a series of clarifying questions and informed affirmations. The exchange ended when I arrived to pick up my daughter from school.

Best line: “If we can’t do this for one another then what are we doing?”

Outcome: Anxiety=reduced. Perspective=gained.

 

The phonies we fall far are the ones we want to fall for: the “news” story about the other candidate’s hidden past; the amazing weight loss plan that permits unchecked eating; the gadget that guarantees newfound simplicity.

In the bazaar of communication that we’re all strolling through every moment of every day, the comforting trinkets of self deception and quick fixes can be had on every corner. Honestly, they’re not that hard to spot. One indicator is the enthusiasm of crowds. If lots of our colleagues are all of a sudden atwitter about a revelation that “changes everything,” we should wait a week before adopting it.

Style and flourish are also giveaways. They’re there to mask a lack of substance. The gem that sparkles overmuch is clearly a fraud. The headline that announces, “You won’t believe what happened next” is telling you what to do with it: don’t believe it. The job that recruits with glossy photos of employees driving sports cars is a pyramid scheme.

It’s not hard to spot a fake.

 

 

 

The three keynote talks I gave at the high school youth retreat last weekend were a convenient vehicle for reviving my flagging Biblical storytelling practice. After watching Casey Wait Fitzgerald tell Bible stories at a NEXT Church event in 2014, I started playing around with the technique (with Casey’s help). I’ve memorized and told about half a dozen stories in worship services since then. It’s been several months though.

So I said “Yes” to keynoting a youth retreat and convinced the organizer to let me try telling one long Biblical story over three keynote addresses. Since the retreat theme was “Anchored,” drawing on the phrase from Hebrews 6:19 about the “sure and steadfast anchor of the soul” that is our hope, I picked a nautical story: Acts 27, Paul’s sea journey to Italy and eventual shipwreck on Malta.

Breaking a long story into multiple storytelling episodes was fun. Also, since there were 45 minutes allotted to each keynote, I had time to explain the story’s context and educate the audience about nautical terms like “lee” and “weighing anchor.” I projected a map behind me and used a laser pointer to trace the journey. The drama of washing ashore on Malta and not making it to our destination was pretty satisfying.

I haven’t seen the retreat evaluations yet, but it felt like the students connected to the story. If nothing else, it allowed me to pick up storytelling as a discipline again, which feels important.

I helped run a youth retreat this weekend, just three days after the Presidential election. Nothing about our planning anticipated the potentially charged atmosphere over the outcome and how that might effect the kids who came on the retreat. So we made a brief statement on the first night about how there’s lots of different feelings in the room about the outcome, and while it’s okay to talk about the election, please do so respectfully. No chanting.

It mostly worked to preserve an environment of recreation and reflection. Some of the leaders reflected as we were leaving that we appreciated a couple of days to turn off all things electoral. But I’m hearing a little bit of student feedback that is disappointed we didn’t make time during the retreat for youth to process it together.

For the youth groups that gathered back home this weekend–the kids who didn’t go on the retreat–, I asked volunteers to leave space for youth to talk about the election. But for the large retreat some of our students went on? Nope.

I’m not sure how that would have gone. A workshop maybe? I spoke during the retreat, and my talks only obliquely made mention of the situation. I never named a candidate. Could I have done something there?

I think the majority of retreat participants were not interested in getting into the election. They wanted a retreat from all that. But it would have been good for some kids, and I wish I’d thought of it.