Easter Sunday, in the afternoon, I flew with my column counterpart, Diane Glass, to Kansas City, Missouri where the headquarters of our press syndicate is located. As many of you know, in addition to the books that I write, I also write a weekly opinion column that appears in somewhere around 50 papers nationwide. It’s actually not just me writing it. It is a debate column where I take a perspective that tends to come from the conservative, safe based Christian world view and debate a subject with my column counterpart Diane who comes at life from a liberal, feminist, agnostic world view. People always ask “What is she like?.” And I always say the same thing, “We get along great.” In person and we have to, because we’re business partners, because we’re syndicated in this debate column together by Universal Press Syndicate for five years, so we better work well together.
We flew to Kansas City in order to have a meeting with Universal Press on Monday the 9th. We started first thing in the morning and told Universal Press that we had some ideas for them that we thought would actually help them as well as their customers, solve one of their customers major problems. A syndicate (for example, our column) sells a piece of content to newspapers around the country. So an editor like the Seattle Times will look at the different cartoons and editorial columns, or sports features that Universal Press Syndicate offers and purchase some of them to run every week. Because we run our column, that’s why our column is carried in the Seattle Times.
The problem is that newspapers are undergoing a real identity crisis these days. They’re losing massive numbers of readers, their circulation is dropping and almost all newspapers, at least the ones that don’t have their heads in the sand, are realizing that they need to do something if they want to survive as a business and that means looking beyond their traditional ‘print’ model. It used to be, that getting a ‘print’ edition of the paper was the only way people could get most of their news, and obviously that is not the case anymore. So, Diane and I went to Universal to talk about this because Universal wants to help their customers solve this problem as well. We pitched ways that our column would work very well with new media, online in particular, and it was a very good thing to be able to touch base with these people. We got to reconnect with ones we have met before, meet the people who had just been ‘a voice on the phone’ and basically just sell the product here the whole day.
In the extraordinary opportunity that I had to even do something like this, it is very unusual to find someone with my worldview that is an evangelical Christian, as well as to have the ability to share that perspective. Around 30% of the population shares my perspectives in general but it’s very rare to see it represented in the secular media world and I’ve always thought that is crazy. Why is it so hard to get that perspective in print? After all, if 30% of the population identifies themselves as evangelical Christians and more than that go to church every single Sunday, surely those people also watch ‘The Today Show’, read the newspaper, and most likely listen to secular media. Even still it is very hard to see our perspective represented. I am very glad to have a chance to be one of those voices that shares what so many of us are facing in my column every week. It was fun to be able to take this trip with Diane as well, I enjoy her company and it was good to be able to bounce ideas off of each other.