Wednesday, September 18, 2002
Read a really good article called
Broadcast Institutions, Community Values. Go read this thing. It's one of the best church pieces I've read in a while, even though it's not written about the church. I forget who posted the link on their blog that led me to the article, but thank you very much! Here's a little taste:
One of the most important things you can do to attract community is to give it a fertile environment in which to grow, and one of the most damaging things you can do is to try to force it to grow at a rapid pace or in a preset direction. . .
Most broadcast organizations assume that reaching a large group is an unqualified good, so they push for size at any cost, and eventually bump into the attendant tradeoffs: you can have large community, but not a highly focused one; you can have a focused community, but not a large one; or you can reach a large number of people focused on a particular issue, but it won't be a community. . . Calling your audience a community doesn't actually make it one.
