Soo true….just  do it…start writing…keep on reading…share  with the world what you think is important and what makes you think,  and describe what that thinking is.

how do we teach the journo-programmer. As you might imagine, I have a few ideas about that.

Here’s what I say. Don’t worry about how to do it, at first — just start doing it. When we started blogging at Harvard, our first few approaches failed. They wouldn’t have worked any better if we spent a year planning them. Better to try an approach, learn, get it out of the way, and come up with new approaches, until you find a way that works. 

Scripting News: The journo-programmer

What’s so frustrating about church people and their organizations is that they’re so “old-media” oriented.  They don’t like experimentation.  The’re too tied  to editorial processes and old-world “production values”  (not that aren’t production values,  but that a major new one is REAL-TIME,  and this gets discarded over  a devotion to "the old production values.  News is happening all the time,  and video production never seems to get done before it’s old news).

I very much identify with what Dave is talking about here.  I’ve always been a “geek”; enthralled with whatever was new in technology.  I took that with me into Youth Ministry (lugging my 40-pound RCA VHS recorder with me every weekend from Seminary and used it to show  and discuss various media values (visa-vi Television Awareness Training and that kind of thing). When computers came  out,  I was playing around.

All along,  I was developing as a writer.  When I was doing a personal journal (between 20 and 27) , I feel that I honed some of those skills.  When I started blogging,  my geek self and my writing self (including my passions for theology, church, politics,  and technology) merged and gave birth to my blog,  which I ‘ve been doing for 8 and a half years.  And I blog passionately about how badly I want to be involved vocationally with the church as an enabler  of blogging and “social networking” with many of the same desires that Dave expresses for education (and I agree with him on education , too,  as I do with  many other of my favorite blogger/tweeter folks like Cluetrain guys Dave Weinberger  and Doc Searls, Techno-journalism folks like Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen, Dan Gillmor, and Net Community evangelists like Howard Rheingold.   I have a keen interest in people who think Sociologically about technology and culture (so, of course,  I was a big fan of WIRED magazine,  especially in its first 10 years before Rossetto sold it.  Still has some good stuff,  but I noticed a distinct difference). 

I think this journo-programmer thing applies pretty strongly to church communications.  I was always keenly aware of how many co-worker fellow “programmers” were so much more pure programming than I,  and hardly related or at all personally invested in the content and the aims of the church for their Web presence.  And the church orgs seem to hire programmers without regard to their involvement with the mission of said church,  as if this was irrelevant.  I always insisted that Web strategy needs to be knowledgable and conversant with goals AND technical tools and possibilities.  When you mix “message people” with “tech people” that have this huge gap between them,  you get a dumbing down,  over-simplifying of how to convey message or what mechanisms  to use to communicate message (and that intermediary “medium is the message” operation. 

So we have a huge gulf in the area of knowing how to leverage social media, blogs,  and all kinds of enabling tools that are and could be an enabling force,  but we lose them between the cracks that exist between message and mechanisms.  It’s SOOOO frustrating. 

So,  thanks Dave Winer for making me think about this ,  in this particular way today.