Retired Pastor Ruminates

RF: Thanks for taking the time to do this, Martin. Your interview a year ago was among my most visited posts. You seem to be the go-to guy on this story, with your extensive background in the newspaper business. Any chance your reporting will become a book someday? Or is that just another dying medium? 

ML: I have a feeling that books will be around a lot longer than newspapers, because people want them for their permanence — they've never regarded newspapers that way. Printed text and graphics in books is a data storage medium, and one that has proven extremely durable (in contrast to various electronic media that are already obsolete, like 8-tracks and video discs). Printed news on newsprint is not data storage, but simply a convenient delivery mechanism that can be replaced if something better comes along, like digital delivery in one format or another. So can books, and that's indeed happening — but for many people and many purposes, the user interface as well as the permanence of the printed book won't be improved enough in a digital format. I don't imagine church liturgists reading the scripture lesson from an iPad, for example (although come to think of it, why not, really?). As for me writing a book, it could happen, but I'm not working on anything. I think there is an overarching story to be told about the decline of American newspapers that has been going on for the last 50 years, but that's a pretty big project. 

RF: One of the things I took away from our discussions last year was that the “crisis” in the newspaper business was actually not a new event so much as a continuation of a declining trend going back to the 1960’s. What has happened since last year? 

ML: More of the same. The industry has still not had a calendar quarter with growth in total ad revenue, and paid circulation continues to fall at a pretty disastrous pace. Late last year industry execs began to tout an improving picture in the form of "moderating declines" — that is, a reduction in the annualized rate of loss from more than 20 percent to something in the teens. This is good news only if you're Dilbert's "pointy-headed boss," who said in a recent strip, "We’ve been doing great since we redefined success as a slowing of failure.” The figure for first quarter of 2010 which just came out is a loss of 10 percent. (It was a loss of 11.4 percent in print, a gain of 4.9 percent in online advertising — the first in two years, combining for a loss of 9.7 percent overall and the 15th losing quarter in a row.) It's possible that the second quarter will show just a single digit decline, with some companies reporting gains. But remember that this is on top of four years with a cumulative loss of about half (46 percent) of total newspaper ad revenue, and the recession officially ended six months earlier. And of course there is absolutely no indication of an end or reversal of those 50-year trendlines (lower household penetration on the circulation side, and smaller share of total U.S. ad spending on the advertising side). 

RF: On your Nieman blog you have been making and tracking your predictions on this story. How have your predictions panned out this past year, and what do you see taking place by this time next year when we do our third annual interview? 

ML: I posted the results of my 2009 predictions back in December, along with a new set of predictions for 2010. As it turns out, I was right that the stock market would be up about 15 percent during 2009, and that newspaper stocks would beat the market. (Basically, they had nowhere to go but up or out.) The rest of it was a mixed bag, with more wrongs than rights. I was most wrong in thinking that newspaper revenue would stabilize by the end of the year — as noted above, the losses were still well into the double digits at year-end. So for next year I'm being more cautious. My first-quarter ad revenue prediction was actually very close; I predicted a loss of 11 percent, it came in at 10 percent. I predicted online revenue would break eight consecutive losing quarters with a break-even result; it came in with a 4.9 percent gain, as noted above. I predicted a 7.5 percent circulation loss for the six-month period ending March 31; it came in at 8.7 percent weekdays and 6.5 percent Sundays. I also made a prediction regarding tablets — this is back in December before iPad mania began. I expected Apple's tablet to hit later in the year, but I predicted a price point of $500 plus the data plan; it's actually $499. Beyond that, I predicted there would be a wave of consolidation in the newspaper industry, which hasn't happened yet, but the year's not over. I also said that there will be big growth in the consumption of news on mobile devices, which includes tablets. And my bet on the Dow for 2010 is that it will be up 8 percent. So far it's down 2.5 percent, so I guess I'm looking for a bounce. And I said that newspaper companies would lag the market as revenue continues to decline — that's true of the New York Times Company and a few others, but not of Gannett, McClatchy and Scripps. 

RF: Electronic readers existed this time last year, but it would have been hard to predict their burgeoning popularity, especially Apple’s iPad. How does this new technology impact the newspaper?

ML: Right, the iPad is just huge, with more than 2 million units sold so far. I posted a set of strategic suggestions to publishers with respect to the iPad and other tablets, which has gotten a pretty good response. Here's the original post at NiemanLab; I refined this into a white paper at “News After Newspapers.” To put it in a nutshell, I think that publishers need to take tablets seriously, especially the iPad. Tablets will be much bigger as leisure-time devices than as workplace tools; they'll be used at home and on vacation; they'll be used in conjunction with other media (like surfing the web while watching TV). As confirmation, there's already data showing that iPad share of web browsing peaks on weekends. And because of their leisure-time utility, tablets will power a major increase in online shopping, which has been kind of stuck in neutral for a few years. All of those are good reasons for publishers to explore how to use them. Nobody really knows yet what kinds of news and advertising formats will work best on tablets, but the experimentation has begun. 

RF: I read the New York Times for free on-line most weekdays (I buy the print version on Sundays). The Times has announced it will begin charging for on-line content next year. There are some successful pay-for-content periodicals (I pay for both the Economist and The New Yorker, for example), but when Newsday put its on-line content behind a pay wall last October they only attracted thirty-five paid subscribers. What’s your best guess about the Times experiment? 

ML: I'm reluctantly coming around to the idea that the Times might make this work, just as the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and others have done for some time already. You might still be able to read a lot of Times stuff for free, because they'll be setting the threshold before the meter starts to run pretty high. This is counterintuitive — they believe that their most loyal, most intensive readers are will be willing to pay, so they'll charge them and not the casual browsers. And they may be right. But I think that a year from now when we do this again, while the Times pay system might be working, most content at most newspaper sites around the country will still be freely available, because the kind of content that most papers can offer, relative to the richness of the Times, simply doesn't give them any pricing power. If they try "paywalls" of any kind, most newspapers will be disappointed.

RF: I first heard the anecdote from you about the student in the focus group who said, “If the news is that important, it will find me.” When you told that to the Monday Evening Club, several of us were dismayed by the story, as if it depicted an uninterested and disengaged youth. But this past year I find it to be more and more true. In a media-saturated culture where we are all plugged in, the news more and more does seem to seek us out. And part of what that means is that by the time my wife asks me if I know about something she is reading in the daily newspaper, I have usually known it already for a day. Clearly the role of the daily in dispensing the breaking stories is changed. Is there a new role for them? 

ML: Yes, but many of them don't really understand it, unfortunately. The right role for a local news organization (let's start by not calling it a news "paper") is to be a platform-independent generator of news content. That means gathering news and distributing by whatever means are most appropriate, in a continuous cycle. That might include sending out Tweets about breaking news, as well as using Twitter and text-messaging to source information from readers; doing the same on Facebook and on reporters blogs; building multiple versions of a story that can go out as an email alert, a web site story, or via a tablet or smartphone app; and participating in and moderating reader comment discussion of it. The printed newspaper becomes a niche product with content pulled out of that stream every 24 hours for distribution to those who prefer that format, but it should no longer be the organization's core, driving product. 

RF: Last year you mentioned the loss of classified ads to the internet as another piece of the crisis. I notice that my kids and their young adult friends buy and sell everything on-line, from apartments to cars and pets. What has happened to that trend in the past year, and what does it mean for newspapers? 

ML: That trend has continued unabated; classified advertising revenue was down 38 percent during 2009 and another 14 percent in the first quarter of 2010. It's running at about one-third the pace it was five years ago, still sliding, and it's never coming back. What newspapers should worry about now is whether retail advertising and shopping on iPad and other tablets can take a similar bite out of what's left of newspaper display advertising and insert advertising. That's a real danger. There are no retail marketers or advertising agencies trying to figure out how to spend more money in newspapers. They're all interested in how to do more advertising and selling on mobile devices of all kinds. 

RF: Thanks, Martin. We’ll see if newspapers survive long enough for us to have another interview next year.

And since early in my ministry I have been asking them to put me on their church newsletter mailing list, and a number of them have.  Many of those have converted to e-letters lately, but still, I get a pretty steady stream of newsletters from congregations, and it is fun to see what my ministerial friends are up to.

Except when it isn’t fun, and that seems to be happening more and more lately.  I will grab and read a newsletter and immediately start noticing little hints of trouble.  I then typically say to my wife, “Uh oh.  So and so is having a disturbance in the Force in his or her congregation!”

Now I recognize that the ministry has always been a perilous profession.  I recently read George Marsden’s fine biography of Jonathan Edwards, and was reminded that Edwards was handed his walking papers in Northampton before he came over here to the Berkshires.  This is the same Edwards that not too many years before had been the toast of the Reformed world for his participation in and reporting of the awakenings in New England.  So it can happen to even the best and the brightest (and as in Edwards case, the wounds are often at least partly self-inflicted.)

So pastors in peril are nothing new, but I have been noticing a discouraging pattern in my newsletter reading lately.  And I must interject here that I have known lazy and incompetent ministers, and others who were just in over their heads, but that is not what I am talking about here.  Several of my friends who are smart, wise, bright, hard-working and faithful have suddenly found themselves in peril.

Typically it starts with some sort of a parish self-study or pastoral assessment.  That should be harmless enough, right?  Who can be against transparency and accountability?  But my heart sinks when I read in the newsletter about the formation of such a group, because sure enough, when the results come in there are “concerns” about the pastor, and a special committee is created to “address the concerns.”  The newsletters typically report such grave findings in a kind of code, but you don’t have to be a genius to read between the lines.

So “steps are put in place” to address the concerns.  The committee may or may not be led by a sympathetic leader but it doesn’t really matter that much because the process itself has a certain trajectory.   If there is a lay “antagonist” in the congregation he or she (or they) will certainly find a way to get involved. 

There soon follows what I call “leadership death by a thousand cuts.” The ministry is quantified by every measure, by hours spent, by visits made, by hours in the office.  Careful time logs are kept.  Business expenses are microscopically scrutinized.

At this point the healthy trusting covenantal relationship between pastor and people has been replaced by a suspicious contractual arrangement that will almost inevitably end in mutual blame and bitterness.  Some pastors will buckle under and keep their “job,” others will devise an exit strategy; one of my good friends just left the ministry, to the church’s loss.

Here are some observations and thoughts from my ruminations on this trend.

1. The roles and assumptions behind this scenario betray a flawed understanding of the church and its ministry.  First of all, an ordained minister of Word and Sacrament is not an employee of the church.  Ministers work in the church and with the church but not for the church.  Ministers are not hired, they are called, and nothing betrays the flawed ecclesiology behind pastors in peril as much as the contractual language of  the modern corporation that is frequently employed.  “We pay your salary, you work for us.”  And behind that view is the idea that the minister’s “job” is to do the work of the congregation, and the laity’s “job” is to oversee that work, which is quite the reverse of the minister providing leadership to the laity to let them be the church of Christ in their community.

2. When the congregation understands its mission as the maintenance of its own institutional life, the pastor’s role is to be the general factotum who facilitates that life.  The flawed model here is that the church is to be a chapel to the culture, which is a Constantinian model left over from a Christian society.  This is why the place where pastors are most in peril is in “tall steeple” churches that by virtue of their social and economic location have been able to pretend that the Constantinian church is still alive and well.

3. But the truth is that that model of church is not alive and well, and the current recession has hit even prosperous congregations hard enough to expose the institutional weakness of a church that needs big infusions of cash to maintain its place as the chapel to culture.  When the numbers (members and money) slump, than the lay leadership turns to corporate models to remedy decline, ie. change the CEO.  Or at least demand better numbers (“metrics”) soon if the relationship is to continue. 

4. To meet the new expectation of better numbers the imperiled pastor must show vigorous signs of improvement that are quantifiable.  More visibilty in the community, more calls and visits, recruitment (not evangelism) to get more members to come and help prop up the sagging finances.  But “what profiteth a man if he gains the numbers and loses his soul?”  By ramping up an already frenetic pace to show results the pastor is depriving himself or herself of what is really needed in the situation, which is holy imagination.  I would argue that more time in the study and at prayer would be better use of the pastor’s time than more energetic involvement in what P.T. Forsyth once called “the sin of bustle.”

5. An ill-conceived pastoral evaluation will almost certainly bring out some discontents among the congregation.  These discontents may be based on the minister’s real or imagined failings or they may result from a variety of mutually exclusive understandings of the pastor’s role.  Clarity about that role, and about  the congregation’s mission, will help avoid such situations.  I once heard Roy Owald of the Alban Institute say a pastor should never be evaluated apart from an evaluation of the congregation.  That sounds wise to me.  And the dreaded congregatonal questionnaire evaluation should be avoided at all costs.  Oswald suggests that both pastor and congregation ask each other, “What do you need more of from me, and what do you need less of?”  This mitigates the adversarial tone of the evaluation processes. 

6. The rigors of pastoral evaluations are the final proof that even though pastors may preach salvation by faith they are often held to a standard of salvation by works.  This is yet another triumph of law over Gospel.

7. Finally, the church of Jesus Christ is not a religious club.  Its mission and ministry is Christ’s own, which is the reconciliation of humanity to God and to one another.  Christ has already accomplished that work of holy love in his atoning cross, and so, to quote Forsyth again, it doesn’t have to be “produced so much as introduced.”  Like Christ, his church does not live for itself.  A congregation that understands that will no longer focus on its own institutional life, but reach out of its walls to embody Christ in its community and the world.  The pastor’s role is to help them do that through Word and sacrament and visionary leadership.  The good pastor sows and waters, feeds and encourages.  If the congregation demands that he or she just run errands for them they will dampen the pastor’s morale and distract both the pastor and themselves from their true and glorious vocation to be the church.  And whenever that happens it is a shame, and will please no one but the devil.