Chicago is buzzing over the abrupt announcement by controversial sportswriter Jay Marriotti that he is leaving the Chicago Sun-Times because the newspaper business is dead and doesn’t want to go down with the ship. While there is a little more to the whole thing, I think his observation of the Olympics coverage was telling. The majority of reporters he saw there were either working for TV or Internet outlets, not newspapers.
“It’s been a tremendous experience, but I’m going to be honest with you, the profession is dying,” Mariotti said, “I don’t think either paper [Sun-Times or Chicago Tribune] is going to survive.
“To showcase your work … you need a stellar Web site and if a newspaper doesn’t have that, you can’t be stuck in the 20th century with your old newspaper.”
What to take from this? I think it speaks to a transition that many churches are struggling with when it comes to technology. Print hymnals are grudgingly giving way to projection screens but its not a technology/entertainment issue, its a communication. Newspaper and yellow page ads are poor investments when 70%+ of people looking for a new church home looks for a web page first. Education curriculum is now video dependent rather than books, overheads, etc… And the list goes on.
The early church learned to speak the Jesus story in languages other than Aramaic (the Hebrew that Jesus spoke) – Greek, Latin, and then beyond. So it is now. Print isn’t dead but paper as the primary delivery medium is rapidly dying. Web pages, projection, and Amazon’s Kindle all are pointing to a new language for the people of the Book to learn to keep it relevant.
Corporations have learned this. The news media is struggling to learn it and now the church. The message hasn’t changed but the medium must if the message is to be heard in future.