Lex Alexander has released his eagerly anticipated recommendations on remaking the Greensboro News & Record’s web site as a public square. It’s fascinating reading. I’m reading it through the lens of the church and how his recommendations are appropriate for churches facing the same cultural, social, and technological changes that newspapers are facing. I’m less than half way through, and a line just hit me so forcefully that I wanted to stop and post about it:

We and our audience basically want the same thing, which is to tell others what we know.

This fundamentally transforms what newspapers (and churches and a lot of other institutions) have built their practices upon: that we the professionals have one goal (to provide information, to persuade, to serve, to lead, to be heard) and our followers have another goal (to receive information, to be persuaded, to listen, to consume). The church certainly operates on that model (the 80/20 rule where 20% of the people do 80% of the work, though I suspect it’s closer to the 95/5 rule in practice). But in truth most people want to be heard, to have a voice, to have an impact (much more so for the cultural creatives, but true for others to an extent as well). Are we willing to change? Here’s what Lex says is at stake for the News & Record, and I suspect the stakes are similar for the church:

As an industry, we’re bleeding, if not hemorrhaging, readers. Absent change, our business’s remaining life can be measured within the remaining careers of most current employees.