Up early to go with our friend Edgar Moyo to St. Helen’s Church of England Church in Notting Hill. I had met the church’s Vicar (Pastor) Steve Divall on previous visits, and he invited me to give a brief report about the work I do and the varied ministries of our missionary team.

Here are two views of the interior of the church building.

After lunch with Edgar at a sidewalk cafe across from the church JoLene and I went to Speakers’ Corner to join our group who go there to engage anyone who wishes in conversation about life, God, the Bible and Jesus.

Speakers’ Corner is in an eastern corner of Hyde Park, but it is actually a fenced walkway, as you see here.

Every Sunday ten or more persons get up on a small stepladder (all at the same time, at different spots along the fences) to give a loud, informal speech on a subject of their choosing. Depending on the interest of the passersby, five or ten or 30 or more will stop to listen – and some heckle and interrupt.

Of our team, usually only one person gives a talk on a ladder (or an informal debate with someone of a different view). The rest of us listen, cheer, and enter into quieter (if possible) conversation with one person or a small group. Our speakers do not talk politics or government; they talk about religion, comparative religions, God and the Christian Scriptures.

While, as I said above, most speakers stand on a small ladder, one fellow today climbed up on the fence and held forth loudly, and angrily it seemed, in a language I did not understand. Soon two others got up on the fence with him.

The speaker is the one on the left. It was not clear to me if the other two were agreeing with him, but it seemed as if they were. However, at one point someone (I did not see who) knocked Mr. White Shirt off the fence, and I feared things might get ugly, but fortunately, they did not.

Here is Jay Smith, our team leader, on the left, in a duo presentation with one of our friends.

The street not far from Speakers’ Corner has been re-landscaped and now has beautiful and unusual features.

As darkness came on, twelve of us went to a Malaysian restaurant on Edgware Road for food, discussion of our ministry experiences, learning about current debates on missions methods, and prayer.

Because of my slide-illustrated talk at St. Helen’s Church, I had to lug my laptop with me all day, which was quite a bother, but I managed.

It’s been a long time since my church was cool.  CP|Northshore| has always been a good church.  A solid-teaching, good worship, kind of church, but it’s been a long time since that building housed a “cool” worship service.  Young, vibrant, hip, relevant…. that sort of thing.  I can honestly say that we’re going in that direction.  It’s a place that I’m happy to call my home.  Steve Bolen brought a good word about the ID of a person.  You know, how Jesus changed Simon’s name to Peter.  It was a good time.  I think it was pertinent to where our church is going.  Our ID is changing.  Even our physical ID. Services are run differently. Worship is modern. Preaching is relevant.  The building getting a facelift.  It feels good to be a part of something that’s modern and cool.  I’ve been a part of plenty of churches that are great churches, churches that are doing what they should be doing for the kingdom.  But I’m getting in on the ground floor of a movement.  A movement that will be a forces the community and the world.  A movement that I want to move with.  And a movement that’s way cool.

The body of Upper Merion High English teacher Susan Reinert was found in the trunk of a car in the parking lot of a Harrisburg motel on same day Smith was being sentenced there for the robberies. A comb was found under her body bearing …[More..]


Smith spent six years on death row after a 1986 conviction for conspiring with another teacher, William Bradfield, to kill suburban Philadelphia English teacher Susan Reinert and her two children. Reinert

By JAY REEVES
Associated Press Writer

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) — Several newspaper executives launched a public relations campaign Monday to counter what they call “gloom-and-doom” reports of the industry’s demise.

Sure, they admit, times are tough. The economy is bad, the Internet has sucked away advertising dollars and people are losing jobs.

But the 100 million people who read a newspaper the day after the Super Bowl outnumbered the TV audience for the game, the group said in an advertisement that appeared Monday in more than 300 daily newspapers, including The New York Times and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

With the ads, commentary pieces and a Web site, the industry is painting itself as a vital source of information and the best place for advertisers to sell anything from grapes to a house — not the dinosaur often portrayed in the media.

“We are our own worst enemy. It’s like there’s a rule we have to beat ourselves up,” said Donna Barrett, a driving force behind the campaign, called the Newspaper Project. “We are still a dominant media, and we don’t give ourselves credit for that.”

Barrett, chief executive of Birmingham-based Community Newspaper Holdings Inc., came up with the idea for the blitz with Randy Siegel, publisher of Parade Publications; Brian P. Tierney, CEO of Philadelphia Media Holdings, which publishes The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News; and Jay Smith, the retired CEO of Cox Newspapers, which owns the Journal-Constitution and other papers.

“We are not trying to be Pollyannaish about the newspaper industry, but all the predictions of our demise are just dead wrong,” Siegel said.

Parade, the weekly magazine inserted into more than 470 Sunday newspapers nationwide, provided seed money in the “low five figures” for the campaign to purchase ads in trade magazines and online, Siegel said. Newspapers donated ad space to the group.

It’s not hard to understand why there has been hand-wringing about the newspaper industry: Each week seems to bring more stories of layoffs or other cutbacks. The United States has about 1,400 daily newspapers, but that’s down about 100 from a decade ago. Cities such as Seattle andDenver could each lose one of their two newspapers soon.

The Star Tribune of Minneapolis filed for bankruptcy last month. Tribune Co., owner of newspapers including the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, did the same thing in December. Even healthier newspaper companies have been scrambling to deal with their debts, including The New York Times Co., which recently agreed to a $250 million loan from billionaire Carlos Slim at a hefty 14 percent interest rate.

Industry analyst Ken Doctor applauded the idea behind the PR campaign. But he said its very name — the “newspaper project” — betrays a fundamental problem that’s threatening the entire industry.

“By 2009, I would have hoped editors would have realized this is not about paper, it’s about news,” said Doctor, a former newspaper executive with Knight Ridder Inc. who is now an analyst with Outsell Inc. “The business model is just busted.”

Doctor said U.S. newspaper ad revenues have dropped 20 percent from an all-time high of $50 billion, and print editions of newspapers will never be a staple for younger readers who have grown up reading news on the Internet. Most newspapers make less than 10 percent of their total revenue off the Internet.

Barrett said the newspapers’ ad campaign was born out of the frustration of seeing a constant string of predictions that newspapers will go out of business before they figure out how retool operations and make a strong profit online.

Lost on the masses, she said, is the fact the that tens of millions of people read newspapers every day, online and in print.

“The crisis has to do with revenue, not with audience,” said Barrett, who also serves as a director of The Associated Press.

As a newspaper journalist my heart races in dread every time I read a piece on newspaper decline and another round of job cuts (and these alerts come at me every day from all the range of sources I read).

So it was refreshingly heartening to read about the start-up of a new website that tries to dispel concerns about the crisis of newspapers that it’s dying.

news.newspaperproject.org, of course another US -run site, has been developed by Community Newspaper Holdings Inc.’s publisher Donna Barrett, Brian Tierney, publisher and CEO of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News; Randy Siegel, president and publisher of Parade Publications, and Jay Smith, former president of Cox Newspapers.

The website, which discusses the future of newspapers, will probably be used in the end as a form of research marketing tool, but I say bring it  on as long as it saves my preferred media medium.

The latest piece from the New York Times Executive Editor looks at the demise of quality journalism, and the growing demand for it, which in turn could explain the  dwindling popularity and respect for journalists. By quality journalism he means the kind that involves experienced reporters going places, bearing witness, digging into records, developing sources, checking and double-checking, backed by editors who try to enforce high standards.

The supply of this kind of journalism is declining because it is hard, expensive, sometimes dangerous work. The traditional practitioners of this craft — mainly newspapers — have been downsizing or declaring bankruptcy. The wonderful florescence of communication ignited by the Internet contains countless voices riffing on the journalism of others but not so many that do serious reporting of their own. Hence the dwindling supply.

I have previously lamented the little support journalists had from editors, publishers, owners and in a way  from the public itself in giving us the tools to be exemplary investigative reporters digging away to uncover the truth.

Look at the uproar The Times caused in the House of Lords by uncovering that Lords could be bought! This was a beautiful piece of journalism – the digging, following through in a project that took a year to materialise, debate within the House of Commons.

Barrett says that the group’s message is simple; that newspaper readership is in fact growing when you take into account combined print and online audience, that newspapers have the public trust in terms of truth and accuracy, that advertisers still invest in newspapers because of their guaranteed results and that as watchdogs against crime and corruption newspapers form an essential part of the democratic system.

However, there are some fatal flaws in this argument.  Combining print and on-line readership undoubtedly shows an increase, but this does nothing to counter the most common argument that it is print which is suffering at the expense of its online rival.  Moreover, whilst advertisers are still continuing to invest there is no denying the fact that there has been a steep drop in advertising revenue this year, as Reuters’ Robert Macmillan points out.

The bottom line is: we need a bit of good news in these hardening times when the number of journalism jobs are steadily decreasing never mind talking about the quality of the paper. We must not forget, or ignore the declining downward trend of the newspaper but it is heartening to hear the executives with some clout in the field are looking at smallest ray of sunshine and trying to bring back those sunny days.

P.S. Hope they are having the same conversation in Britain, otherwise I predict a typical US-bound brain drain.

Sara Laforce, left, and Jay Smith, right, from The Hope Center, hold candles representing people affected by the HIV/AIDS virus, their family and friends Monday night in front of the Lexington Public Library. Five candle stations were set up around downtown so participants could pick up a candle from wherever they were and meet at the library, said Mark Royse, the executive director of AIDS Volunteers, Inc. According to a semi-annual report released in June, there are 3,000 people in Kentucky currently living with HIV/AIDS, Royse said. He said while media attention has been focused on the cases in Africa and India, it is important to remember that this is still an issue in the United States.

From The Christian Science Monitor:

Gilding the lily is nothing new to politics. From the 1840s when William Henry Harrison claimed to have been born in a log cabin (it was actually a Virginia plantation) to Ronald Reagan’s reminiscing about flying over Germany in World War II (he did, but only in a movie), politicians have taken perfectly good stories and embellished them.

This campaign is no exception.

…snip…

The latest embellishments come from the McCain camp. Cindy McCain has repeatedly referred to herself as an “only child.” This week came news that she actually has two half sisters, although apparently she had very little contact with them.

The McCain campaign had also put out the story that Mother Teresa “convinced” Cindy to bring home two orphans from Bangladesh in 1991.

Mrs. McCain, it turns out, never met Mother Teresa on that trip. (Once contacted by the Monitor, the campaign revised the story on its website.)

Original DVD cover.

The story about Mother Teresa “convincing” Mrs. McCain to bring home two children from an orphanage in Bangladesh has been retold many times. Initially, the “About Cindy McCain” page on the McCain campaign website read: “Mother Teresa convinced Cindy to take two babies in need of medical attention to the United States. One of those babies is now their adopted daughter, 16-year-old Bridget McCain.”

The media picked up the theme. A story earlier this year on ABC’s “Good Morning America” stated, “With Mother Teresa’s encouragement she brought her fourth child, Bridget, home.” An April 2008 Wall Street Journal profile states that Mother Teresa “implored” Cindy to bring the girls to the United States. Other articles say Cindy did it “at the behest” of Mother Teresa.

…snip…

According to biographies of Mother Teresa, in 1991 she was in Mexico where she developed medical problems. From there, she went to a hospital in La Jolla, Calif.

A McCain source acknowledged that Cindy McCain did not meet Mother Teresa during the 1991 trip to Bangladesh but said McCain did meet her later on, although the source could not say when or where.

…snip…

In another instance, McCain told the Chicago Tribune earlier this year that on one of her medical missions to Vietnam she was in “the very hospital – and in the very room – where her husband was brought after being shot down and then beaten by a mob during the war.”

A 1992 Washington Times story recounts a different version: “Mrs. McCain asked to see the operating room and her husband’s cell, but was turned down. She took the rejection philosophically. ‘It’s 27 years later. Let’s go on,’ Mrs. McCain said.”

The McCain campaign again declined to comment on the discrepancy.

And let’s not forget these little fibs, kids:
Salon:

Oct. 18, 1999 | PHOENIX — GOP presidential candidate John McCain’s wife Cindy took to the airwaves last week, recounting for Jane Pauley (on “Dateline”) and Diane Sawyer (on “Good Morning America”) the tale of her onetime addiction to Percocet and Vicodin, and the fact that she stole the drugs from her own nonprofit medical relief organization.

It was a brave and obviously painful thing to do.

It was also vintage McCain media manipulation.

…snip…

She granted semi-exclusive interviews to one TV station and three daily newspaper reporters in Arizona, tearfully recalling her addiction, which came about after painful back and knee problems and was exacerbated by the stress of the Keating Five banking scandal that had ensnared her husband. To make matters worse, McCain admitted, she had stolen the drugs from the American Voluntary Medical Team, her own charity, and had been investigated by the Drug Enforcement Administration.

The local press cooed over her hard-luck story. One of the four journalists spoon-fed the story — Doug McEachern, then a reporter for Tribune Newspapers [...] wrote this rather typical lead:

“She was blonde and beautiful. A rich man’s daughter who became a politically powerful man’s wife. She had it all, including an insidious addiction to drugs that sapped the beauty from her life like a spider on a butterfly.”

What McEachern and the others didn’t know was that, far from being a simple, honest admission designed to clear her conscience and help other addicts, Cindy McCain’s storytelling had been orchestrated by Jay Smith, then John McCain’s Washington campaign media advisor. And it was intended to divert attention from a different story, a story that was getting quite messy.

…snip…

The irony is that Cindy’s secret would have stayed secret if John McCain’s heavy-hitting lawyer, John Dowd (of D.C.’s Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld; his most recent claim to fame was serving as co-counsel for fellow partner Vernon Jordan during impeachment) hadn’t heavy-handedly pulled out all the stops to protect the McCain family.

Dowd tried to get back at the man on Cindy McCain’s staff, Tom Gosinski, who had blown the whistle on her drug pilfering to the DEA. But in the course of trying to get local law enforcement officials to investigate Gosinski — Dowd and the McCains considered him an extortionist; others might call him a whistleblower — Dowd set in motion a process that would eventually bring the whole sordid story to light. When that maneuver backfired, the McCain media machine went into overdrive to spin the story.

…snip…

In the early 1990s, Tom Gosinski was the director of government and international affairs for the American Voluntary Medical Team, which did relief and medical volunteer work in third world countries.

Hired by Cindy McCain in 1991, Gosinski enjoyed his job, but he began to notice McCain’s erratic behavior in the summer of 1992. In his journal, he wrote that he and others suspected the boss was addicted to painkillers and might have been stealing them from the organization.

From Gosinski’s journal, July 27, 1992:

[...] During my short tenure at AVMT I have been surrounded by what on the surface appears to be the ultimate all-American family. In reality, I am working for a very sad, lonely woman whose marriage of convenience to a U.S. Senator has driven her to: distance herself from friends; cover feelings of despair with drugs; and replace lonely moments with self-indulgences.

In January 1993, McCain fired Gosinski. She told him that AVMT was having financial problems and couldn’t afford him.

Gosinski had already come to suspect that Cindy McCain had gotten volunteer doctors with AVMT to sign prescriptions for her, and had used employees’ names to fill them. Worried his own name had been used (he would eventually learn that it had), Gosinski approached DEA agents in the spring of 1993 to report McCain’s suspicious behavior. The DEA launched an investigation.

…snip…

Almost a year later, with the statute of limitations about to run out, Gosinski hired a labor attorney and sued Cindy McCain for wrongful termination. He intended to claim that she fired him because she suspected he knew about her addiction, but the lawsuit never got that far. Instead, Gosinski’s attorney wrote to the McCains, asking for a settlement of $250,000.

…snip…

The entire story would likely have gone unreported if attorney John Dowd hadn’t entered the picture. He wrote to Maricopa County attorney Richard Romley, a political ally of McCain, and asked him to investigate Gosinski for extortion.

…snip…

Thus began the inadvertent outing of Cindy McCain.

…snip…

Among the questions asked: Did Cindy McCain get preferential treatment by the feds? True, Cindy was a first-time offender, which partially explains the fact that she did no prison time; instead, she entered a diversion program. But at the time, defense lawyers told New Times that if Cindy McCain had been a poor minority and not married to a U.S. senator, she likely would have been locked up.

And, of course, there was….Recipegate! From The New York Observer:

In April, Cindy McCain posted a few recipes, including one for a Passion Fruit Mousse and another for an Ahi Tuna with a Napa Cabbage Salad, in a section of John McCain’s Web site titled Cindy’s Recipes.

Unfortunately, these were not her recipes. They were lifted word-for-word from recipes on the Food Network website, one of which was penned by Rachael Ray. The McCains claimed that it was all an intern’s fault and called it a “low-level unpaid staff debacle.”

Mrs. McCain may have to find another intern to blame because somehow she’s managed to do it again!

The current issue of Family Circle magazine put Michelle Obama’s recipe for Shortbread Cookies with zest of lemon and orange against Mrs. McCain’s Oatmeal Butterscotch Cookies for readers to choose the best. Now, according to the blog Meaningful Distraction, Ms. McCain’s recipe appears to once again be plagiarized. This time from Hershey’s.

Tsk, Tsk, Ms. McCain.

Jay Smith today announced his retirement as president of Cox Newspapers, which owns the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Austin American-Statesman, Dayton Daily News and other excellent local newspapers. I’ve known Jay since our first journalism class together at Ohio State 40 years ago. In my completely biased opinion, he’s been one of the outstanding media executives of our generation. The proof is in the quality improvements in the newspapers Jay has served as publisher (those above) and in other Cox papers in Palm Beach and elsewhere. Jay chaired the Newspaper Association of America, served on the board of Associated Press and held other key industry roles. In each case, he been an untiring advocate of quality journalism and the public’s right to know. He’s still a young man, so more great things are expected. In an email to friends this morning, Jay said:

The challenges facing newspapers are daunting, but the men and women of Cox Newspapers are up to the task. As long as we remember to exist for others, not for ourselves, we will do fine. How will it all turn out and what route will get us there? Darned if I know, but I’m confident of a good outcome. And may you never lose sight of the fact that newspapers and, increasingly, their Web sites are vital to an informed and active democracy. 

Jay goes out as he has always been, a class act.

One of my favorite people in the world is blogging.   Jay Smith and I grew up in the same church, he serves as the youth pastor at said church, and I interned with him way back in the day.  Jay has always been a great friend, and somehow his wife Sandy and my wife Kathy, became super friends withing .oo745 seconds of meeting each other.  Their good people.  )

He’s had a blog for a while, but lately he has really amped it up and he is throwing out some great thoughts, particularly today’s post.  Where Is God Not?

This is a great post on the fact that we need to be missional, which is really all about taking the gospel to the world, in whatever shape it takes in your context.  Great stuff Jay!

Check out the mind of Jay and tell him I said Hola!

News Update 10.29.07

North Carolina

People of Faith Against the Death Penalty is hosting a tour of death row exonerees which will be making stops in Chapel Hill, Davidson, Durham, Greenville, Wilmington, Greensboro, Raleigh, Carrboro, Hickory, and Jacksonville over the next few days. Speakers include Ray Krone, Jay Smith, and Greg Wilhoit. For more information contact organizer Amanda Lattanzio at 919-933-7567 or amanda@pfadp.org.

Elsewhere

The Fifth Circuit (which handles federal appeals from Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas) has once again stolen the Supreme Court’s lunch money. In refusing to grant a stay of execution for Earl Wesley Berry, the 5th stomped its foot and declared that SCOTUS can’t tell it what to do. Advocates on both sides hope that SCOTUS will stand up to the bully and hold on to its PB&J. (That is, we hope that the Supreme Court will seize this opportunity to clarify whether its cert grant in Baze was intended to stay all executions until the lethal injection question has been decided.) (c/o CDW, SCOTUSblog, and SLAP)

The full Eleventh Circuit (which handles federal appeals from Alabama, Florida, and Georgia) will hear arguments on the stay of execution for Daniel Lee Siebert. Although the decision to rehear the case en banc nullified the order issued by a three-judge panel of the Court and vacated the stay issued by that panel, the Court immediately issued another stay of execution, pending the as yet unscheduled hearing. (c/o StandDown and CDW) Among the state-of-the-art procedures that Alabama says should exempt its new execution protocol from a Baze stay: calling the inmate’s name and pinching his arm to make sure he is unconscious. (c/o Abolish)

In Connecticut, an anti-death penalty congregation struggles with the violent deaths of three cherished members.

Thanks to Maureen Matthews for letting me know about the recent conference in L.A. by and for people new to their Alz. diagnosis. The LA Times article tells of two men with early on-set and in early stages, Richard Bozanich and Jay Smith, who met at an early stage support group and dreamed of holding a conference that would energize, organize, and activate people who were in the same boat.

They are part of a larger, growing group of people diagnosed with Alz (or “probable-Alz” or with Alz-like symptoms) who are speaking out. DASNI, Alzheimer’s Spoken Here, Dementia USA. The New York City Chapter of the Alz. Assoc. has an annual conference (May 2nd this year) for people in early stages and conferences and support groups have been emerging across the country in the last several years.

All these groups aim to improve the quality of life of people with dementia. The DASNI site includes a plea and an outline from Christine Bryden for the group to focus their advocacy efforts to make Dementia a global health priority. My yearning is to find a way to link existing movements together – we are not just one disease or another…

We are just at the beginning of a new way to see and understand Alz and dementia…