This latte art is actually tea art. Cool huh. A while ago (in 2008 I think) I posted a link to this Rooibos that you make like an espresso. I didn’t think much of it until I spotted this the other day.
Pretty cool.
Author: Nathan Campbell
Nathan runs St Eutychus. He loves Jesus. His wife. His daughter. His son. His other daughter. His dog. Coffee. And the Internet. He is the pastor of City South Presbyterian Church, a church in Brisbane, a graduate of Queensland Theological College (M. Div) and the Queensland University of Technology (B. Journ). He spent a significant portion of his pre-ministry-as-a-full-time-job life working in Public Relations, and now loves promoting Jesus in Brisbane and online. He can't believe how great it is that people pay him to talk and think about Jesus. If you'd like to support his writing financially you can do that by giving to his church.
Lattea art
How to introduce yourself better
Don’t ever introduce yourself by your job title. Job titles are terrible and should be scrapped. Unless they’re really literal. There is only one thing worse than someone who introduces themselves by their title – and that’s someone who introduces themself with an obtuse and confusing buzzy weasleword description that requires a follow up question.
First impressions are important. Especially if you’re a conference speaker, or somebody it is important for the people meeting you to know. Don’t start a conversation with an obtuse statement unless it’s a joke that you explain straight away, and even then… don’t do it.
It was refreshing listening to the guest speaker at our camp over the weekend introduce himself and speak passionately about his new role – “campus evangelist” – by itself this would be buzzwordy and unclear – but he told us what it looked like and spoke with genuine passion about the task. This was cool. If you must use your title do it properly.
Occam’s razor and theology
I’ve been thinking about my approach to the Bible. The first five weeks of college have been pretty intense for me – but probably not as intense as they have been for other people who possibly feel like the rug has been pulled out from under their feet a little when it comes to the way theologians treat the Bible and the interaction between the historical context and theological truths. Here is my thinking…
My overarching understanding, or first principle, is that the Bible is the clear word of God, our job is to make sense of it based on what we know of the original audience, the way God communicates, and ultimately the work of Jesus. This understanding colours my understanding of everything from Genesis to Revelation, and each form of biblical literature.
Theology is like science – we’re constantly moving to a more perfect understanding of each part of the Bible as we build our picture of the lives of the original hearers and readers of the word. We’re unlikely to ever completely overturn our current “theories” based on this evidence, but we will gain a slightly more nuanced picture of the meaning of different writings if we learn something new about what was going on in the first century (NT) or in the history of Israel.
So understanding that “this current distress” that Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians 7 may refer to a massive famine in the Corinthian region means we don’t have to assume that Paul was a failed apocalyptic prophet who thought the world would end in his lifetime, but rather that he thought it wise for couples not to marry if they couldn’t feed likely offspring. Revelation makes more sense if you understand that Nero was on the scene around the time it was written, that the number 666 was particular to Nero, and that Rome was persecuting Christians around the time it was written… this makes more sense to me than some sort of dispensational premillenialism.
Which leads me to this point of applying Occam’s razor to every “theological” position. If there’s a better explanation that requires less jumps, that is consistent with the rest of scripture, and preferably magnifies the work of Christ – then I’ll be pretty prepared to take that explanation quickly – rather than fighting to hold on to ingrained presuppositions.
Again, I don’t think this is rocket science or revolutionary – it’s just something I’ve been thinking about.
Leave of absence
Dear readers,
I will not be blogging much this weekend. I have an essay to write, a church camp to attend and a debut to make for Kustard FC – the Baptist League’s most brilliantly coloured football team. That is roundball football. I am very excited.
I look forward to catching you on the flip side. I trust that you won’t feel withdrawals as much as I will.
A rasher decision
Bacon toilet paper*. I’m not sure there’s anywhere I can go with this. Except to say that if you’re going to print something on your toilet paper it may as well be something awesome.
If you’re trying to understand why I talk about bacon so much perhaps you should read point four from this Slate article.
*not made from bacon.
Overthinking Sandwich Aesthetics
I love Overthinking It. They truly raise the stakes of analysis to amazing levels. Take this post on sandwiches. It opens with a rather spectacular chart of the relationship between ingredients and preparatory skill.
They also get points for knowing about coffee.
Coffee is in the top middle. The ingredients do matter here, some, but not nearly as much as the preparation. It’s very easy to take some high-end small-batch free-trade shade-grown hand-roasted Ethiopia Harrar, and turn it into something that tastes like cat piss by messing up the brewing process. Its opposite number is breakfast cereal. This is all but impossible to screw up: your culinary experience is determined entirely by which brand of cereal you buy…
But it’s their take on sandwiches that really deserves to be considered.
The atrocity at left [above] is the “Bacon Whoopee,” available at the Carnegie Deli for a mere $22. As a bacon-delivery vector, this is superlative. As a sandwich, it is completely incompetent. A properly calibrated sandwich is all about balance. It is an exquisitely tuned chord. Allow any one element to overwhelm the others, and the sandwich is ruined. Ruined! You need to be able to taste every component. At the Carnegie Deli, this is not going to happen. This is also the problem with the sandwiches at Subway. It doesn’t really matter what you order at subway: they basically all taste like the bread, with a little crunchiness from the lettuce. (This is why when I have to eat at Subway, I just get the vegetarian sub. It tastes the same, and it’s cheaper.)
The solution… summarised.
Cheese: The slices should be very, very thin, and no more than two layers… If you want more cheese, don’t put the layers next to each other. I list cheese first because it’s the sandwich’s limiting factor.
Meat: About two to three times the size (by thickness) of your cheese layer. Thin slices are important here too: this is the one thing that the standard deli sandwich gets right. But it’s not so much because of the flavor. It’s because a thick slice of meat is hard to bite through…
Lettuce, Tomatoes, Pickles, Cucumbers, and the like: The combined [vegetable] layer, though, should be exactly the same size as the meat layer. Obviously if you’re using something very strongly flavored… you want to use less…
Condiments: Less than you think… Spread thin, using just enough to moisten the surface of both slices of bread, and let it go. Grinding a some fresh black pepper onto the bread after you apply the condiments is often a nice touch.
Bread: …firm enough to hold the sandwich together… not be so coarse as to scratch the roof of your mouth. The two slices, together, should be about the same thickness as the meat layer…
A map of Christianity in America
I wonder what an equivalent would look like in Australia.
Probably a lot of empty, nominally Catholic space.
Bacon chips
Apparently a bunch of my fellow first years think of me as “the bacon guy”… I confess I may use bacon as a yardstick of orthodoxy. It’s what separates the (Christian) men from the (Jewish) boys in the early church. I have framed a couple of questions about theology with bacon as the pivotal point… and I did ask a question in New Testament about why Jews kept pigs for Jesus to drive demons into (I’ve pondered that here somewhere too). My reputation is probably deserved – but, my fellow first years, watch who you make these statements to. I have ears everywhere…
But I digress. I can’t help but be excited about this post. Bacon and chips are two food groups that I enjoy as part of my balanced diet. I can cut a food group completely – and thus be healthier – just by eating these bacon chips. That’s right. Bacon chips.
We start with the best quality potatoes and add a proprietary blend of some extra-bacony goodness. They will put a grin on your face and promise to test your limits of self-control.
For the iPhone Bible readers
We’re all very excited anbout the new ESV iPhone app – which presents the well documented dilemma regarding being spotted staring at an electronic device in church services.
Izaac devised this solution:
Long time readers may have seen this before – but there is a commercial solution (you don’t need to hack up a Bible – give it to an enquiring friend instead)… this was designed for hiding a flask – but it looks like it would do well with an iPhone… it also comes with a bonus flask so that you can carry around your spirits with you as well.
If you’re more musically inclined there’s a hymn book iPhone cover that will do the trick too.
History of coffee
I made a throwaway comment in class the other da that Jesus probably drank coffee. This is incorrect. Coffee was discovered as a beverage in about 800 AD. There’s a nice, concise history right here. Including a passage that tells the story of how coffee came to Christendom (before it was a legitimate form of ministry).
“Europe was introduced to coffee in the late 1500s by Venetian travelers. Priests tried to get coffee banned for Catholics by Pope Clement VIII because it was so popular in the Muslim world. They thought that since Muslims did not drink wine (a holy sacrament), the devil must have given them this devilish brew. For Christians to drink it was to risk the devil’s trap. Curious, the good Pope wanted to examine this “devil’s brew” and had some brought to him. At first he just smelled it, but then to the horror of the priests, he drank some. The priests thought he might die or turn into the devil. Instead he declared it delicious and baptized it, thus snatching it away from the devil’s grasp and opening up the coffee trade to Europe.”
So the pope isn’t always wrong.
How to write a Media Release to promote your church event
Mikey responded to yesterday’s rant about media releases with a post on Christian Reflections urging churches to think about how they can use the media. The day before yesterday a friend in Townsville sent me an email asking for some tips on how to talk to the media – she had sent a release out and had received some interest from a local television station.
For those wondering what makes me qualified to give this advice here are my qualifications in a nutshell. I’m a journalism graduate who spent four years working as a corporate communications hack for a regional development and tourism marketing body – I marketed my organisation and the Townsville region. I wrote hundreds of media releases and had a pretty good strike rate in terms of getting them placed. This was partly because Townsville is a regional centre with lots of media outlets and a finite number of sources, and partly because my organisation had a finger in just about every pie, and probably partly because I know what I’m doing. Enough self promotion for now…
It’s time to put all those years of spin twitting to good use – here’s my guide to writing a media release for your church event, and some tips for what to do when it is picked up, and when it’s not…
The first thing you’ve got to remember when sending out a release is that journalists are time poor and get heaps of media releases. You need to be prepared for the idea that they may not get past the heading and the lede (the first line). If you’re lucky they’ll think your release is interesting and read to the end, if you’re really lucky they’ll want to follow it up. With that in mind… follow these steps.
- Write an intriguing headline – it doesn’t have to be literal, puns are ok, but make sure you get some feel for what the story is about from the heading.
- Put the important stuff first – who, what, where, when, and most importantly why. The first four are easy. The why needs to cover why you’re doing it, why the outlet should cover it (is it news), and why their audience should be interested in coming.
- If you’ve never spoken to the media before put some information about who you are in the second or third paragraph.
- Keep it short – ball park 500 words.
- Include quotes from a spokesperson – do as much work as possible for the journalist – if they don’t have to call you for follow up that works for them. Three sentences (or paragraphs) of quotes should suffice.
- Include a closing paragraph that contains a call to action – how can people register for an event? Who do they RSVP to? Media Releases are great to put on your website too, it won’t necessarily just be the journos reading them.
- Include contact details for follow up – and most importantly – be available for calls from a journo. They’re not going to follow you up just because you think your story is worth it (unless it really is). If it feels like covering the story is doing you a favour (and not a disservice) then treat it as such. If your availability is patchy put when you are free in the footer of your release.
- Send it first thing in the morning (if you want television coverage) or after lunch if you want to give the paper a free run at it. Remember that media releases need to be timely. Don’t send it six months out from the event (unless that’s when you need registrations).
- Remember that you won’t always get a response. That’s ok. Send releases regularly so that you can build a rapport and a reputation with the local media. If it’s your first release, or an important event, place a phone call to the newsroom’s chief of staff (not the editor) and make sure they received your release. Be prepared to talk them through your event – pitch it to them as a story that matters to their audience. It’s also ok to call before you send it to make sure you’ve got the address of the newsroom right – you may also need to fax a copy through.
- Remember that pictures are worth 1,000 words. Be prepared to have a quirky photo op lined up for a newspaper or some pictures for a TV station to shoot – TV stories without pictures are dead. Make it clear in your footer that you have opportunities for filming or photos – and be creative. Does your event involve people in costumes? Get someone on site in a costume. This will give your story the best possible chance for the best possible coverage.
Once your release is in the wild you need to play a little game I like to call “wait and see what happens”… if you do get a call from a journalist – relax. Take a deep breath. Most of them are nice people, and most of them aren’t out to build a reputation as a bloodhound who takes down churches and disgraces ministers. Here’s how to get the best out of your interaction with the media post release…
- Never ever, let me repeat, never ever say “no comment” or “I can’t answer that” – if you get a tough question just answer it without answering it. Learn from the politicians, turn the question into an opportunity to push your agenda. Say “it’s interesting that you ask that, I think it’s important, but right now we just want to tell you about…” if they ask again, say it again. Repeat ad nauseum. They’ll get sick of asking the same question before you get sick of answering it.
- Try to include the gospel – you never know what they won’t cut.
- Remember they’re looking for eight second sound grabs or two sentence print quotes. Try to be quotable, succinct, and interesting.
- Don’t wear stripes or loud colours for TV interviews.
- If you mispeak during an interview pause, correct yourself, and start the sentence again – unless you’re doing a live interview (which I don’t really recommend unless you’re pretty experienced). Be prepared to tell the journalist that you stuffed up and want a do over.
- Stick to your point – stick with what you know.
- A good journalist will ask you at the end “is there anything you’d like to add” – use this as an opportunity to make a clear statement about your event and why people should come… and then stick the gospel in there. Journalists need it too. Even if they cut it they’re hearing it.
- Act with integrity, smile, make small talk before the interview with the journo to make yourself comfortable.
- Remember to blink if you’re looking at a camera, breath, relax, look confident, look up not at your toes, look at the journo, not at the camera.
- Speak clearly. Deliver your words as though you’re speaking to a crowd, not just to one person. I have a theory that Camera presence comes from aiming your words to the back of the camera not the lens – like when you kick a soccer ball you try to hit the far side while connecting with the front, or when you hit a cricket ball you follow through…
If this all sounds too hard I’ve set up a fiverr task where you can pay me $5 to write you a ten line media release. If you want to use me more than once I’ll probably make you pay more – but I’m happy to help. And I’m always happy to read over something before you send it out…
YouTube Tuesday: The elements of an oscar winner
I haven’t watched a whole lot of YouTube since I’ve been predominantly browsing using mobile broadband – I confess to not having seen this the whole way through. And I even think a couple of other people in my blogroll may have posted this already. But it’s topical (given that we just had the Oscars).You
On elegant analogies
While I’m in the mood for trying to express myself by the power of analogy I thought I’d share – for those not reading the comments on yesterday’s post – I thought I’d share this “gem” with you.
I’m still trying to come up with a way to affirm the good in all the good frameworks for Biblical Theology – and I’m loving Dr Leigh’s “expectation and fulfillment” (coming soon to a publication near you) idea.
I think any simplification causes the object in focus to suffer, because it can’t possibly not – simplifications involve cutting out of bits that don’t fit the “big idea”, though like some sculpture said “when I sculpt a statue of a horse I take a block of wood and cut away all the bits that aren’t horse” (rough paraphrase)… this got me thinking a bit. Simplifications are good for clarity. They help us see the main game. They help us appreciate the value. It’s a bit like diamonds. Uncut diamonds are worth a lot – because they have such potential. There are all sorts of directions you can go with the diamond thing as an analogy for Biblical Theology – each system is like a jeweler’s lens – they help us to appreciate something about the value of the diamond. And they help us to get rid of rubbish ideas about the meaning of passages (eg moral teachings from the OT that ignore Christ). But here’s where I went in the comments last night (with some modifications). I think it’s more helpful to think of each (good) system of Biblical theology as a facet of a precious jewel…
I like to think of the Bible as a really big diamond – one that is so big we can’t look at it all at once. You can look at one facet of the diamond and through it see all the others, this can distort each other facet if you forget that you can flip the diamond around and look at it from a different angle. Some people stand too close, or lack depth perception, and will only see one facet of the diamond ignoring all the others. Some will want to break the diamond up into lots of pieces, thus devaluing it.
The best way to appreciate the diamond is to step back and see that there are many facets at work and that each of them contributes to the diamond’s beauty in a slightly different way. Light hits each and refracts differently. If I wanted to be trite I would say “when you shine a light into any facet of the diamond and focus that light on a smooth surface it makes a cross – no matter which facet you point the diamond through…” But I’m not trite, so I won’t.
On essay writing
I think I quite enjoy essay writing. Though I may have romanticised it from my fleeting memories of putting in caffeine fueled all-nighters on deadline day while I was at uni. I’m trying to figure out what the difference is between essay writing and blogging (other than the finding reputable sources to cite bit).
Here is what I’ve come up with (not as a difference, but as a reflection on the art). I might be wrong. Feel free to crush my analogy in its infancy in the comments.
Essay writing is like finding threads of common quality from an array of garments, and tugging them out of those items in order to weave your own smaller and less significant rag.
Obviously you don’t damage the original in the process – unless you really go out of your way to discredit it.
I am enjoying the essay I’m writing for Bruce Winter’s Christ and the Clash of Cultures subject. Here is the question:
Citizens in the first century met in the context that declared who they were. Discuss the implications of this for the gatherings of the first Christians in the Roman East.
I’m sort of dancing around the question and trying to just write about the differences between the way the church ate together and the way pagan Rome ate at idol temples and banquets. I think I’ve jumped through enough logical hoops to synchronise the question with my topic.
Why you shouldn’t care that 50% of all media coverage comes from PR
As a former PR spin twit* nothing raises my hackles faster than the suggestion that PR is a pointless industry that thrives on the back of lazy journalism like a carrion bird picking the dead carcass of this once noble industry.
Crikey “broke” a story today, a bit of a non-story if you ask me, and it is certainly not “news” to anybody who knows anything at all… more than half of the stories in the media that Crikey monitored for a week originated in Public Relations.
After analysing a five-day working week in the media, across 10 hard-copy papers, ACIJ and Crikey found that nearly 55% of stories analysed were driven by some form of public relations. The Daily Telegraph came out on top of the league ladder with 70% of stories analysed triggered by public relations. The Sydney Morning Herald gets the wooden spoon with (only) 42% PR-driven stories for that week.
I’d be willing to bet that 95% of that 55% were about newsworthy issues that were worth breaking, and that they were reported in a fair and balanced manner.
As a PR spin twit I released hundreds of media releases a year – and probably 30% of them were never ever going to get printed but were released to meet KPIs, commitments to other organisations, or political expectations. Media releases are currency in modern business – a way that companies can be seen to be taking a proactive stance on issues. Who cares if this sort of release is picked up (well me, as a PR spin twit whose pay increases are dependent on a better than average rate of pick up of my stories)? Some media releases are produced simply to reflect the company line on issues upon request, others are glorfied advertorials that might get a run on a really slow news day – but the vast majority – are things that a company believes are going to make the news because they are inherently newsworthy. Media placement is competitive – especially when you’re in a major city where space is tight. You’re not going to cheapen your brand by releasing something that everybody recognises as dross – unless you’ve got a really good reason to do so. You want to be the guy the media calls when they need stories, not the guy who clogs their inboxes with meaningless corporatised tripe filled with weasel words.
I’m actually surprised at how low that figure is – I wonder if they excluded all sporting stories from the mix – which would be a folly, because I can’t think of any competitive sports team that doesn’t employ a media manager to train players in how to talk to the media after games. PR is happening any time someone talks to a journalist with an agenda. Unless the journalist gazumps somebody with an FOI story, or doorstops them with a bombshell question, you can bet that “PR” is at play when any spokesperson from a listed company, political party, advocacy body, or sporting team fronts a camera.
If this figure only considers proactive PR, rather than reactive PR, it’s still lowballing the actual reality – there are thousands of ways to place a story – and unless a journalist literally stumbles across the story themselves on the way to work you can bet they’ve got a source who is interested in seeing a story getting out. Whistleblowers are engaging in public relations.
It’s disingenuous to run this story suggesting that the landscape of journalism is changing, or indeed that there’s a problem with the idea of public relations. Journalists are interested in pursuing either truth or their newspaper’s particular agenda (read the hobby horses of their readership). These biases are usually so overt it’s as if they’re declared on the masthead or clearly obvious from the demographics they reach. So long as news is market driven – ie giving the masses’ itching ears what they long to hear – PR professionals have to be presenting stories in interesting and intriguing ways that will move units and sell advertising.
Here are some facts to consider when dismissing news coverage because it originates in PR…
- Most public relations professionals hold some sort of qualification in journalism or communication
- Most have a good eye for a story
- Most are killing more dumb stories in their organisation as editorial decisions (ie things people think are stories that aren’t) than they are releasing
- Most are investigating their claims and fact checking rigorously to avoid releasing bad information (which is deadly for any company that trades on its reputation)
- Most have a vested interest in the truth getting out – unless they’re working for a terrible and unscrupulous company in which case they’re interested in cover up and are culpable, or working for a politician in which case their bias figuratively written all over their faces.
PR people aren’t the bad guys – and spin mostly isn’t the enemy. Spin is the product of a culture that crucifies any company or individual brave enough to take an unpopular stand. If you want to know why politicians vacillate and pontificate rather than providing answers to questions from journalists look what happened to Tony Abbott when he admitted the he’s scared of homosexuals (which was admittedly a pretty stupid thing to say).
This quote from the editor of The Australian – Chris Mitchell – to Crikey is pretty telling…
“It’s very difficult I think, given the way resources have drifted from journalism to public relations over the past 30 years, to break away as much as you really want to … I guess I’m implying, the number of people who go to communications school and go into PR over the years has increased and the number in journalism has shrunk even more dramatically.”
Why are we assuming that the better trained and more talented journalists end up working for the media? I’d rather keep a good company from the maws of the ravenous tabloid journalist than feed the masses their latest sacrifice any day of the week. There is no real nobility in the fourth estate (the media) any longer.
The Crikey article reaches some stupid conclusions that are pretty close to scaremongering propaganda themselves.
Our investigation strongly confirms that journalism in Australia today is heavily influenced by commercial interests selling a product, and constrained and blocked by politicians, police and others who control the media message.
Why is controlling a message a bad thing? If it was up to the unscrupulous headline grabbing media barons they’re conduct crucifixions by media, or put heroes on pedestals, just to sell more papers. Why would the media run a moderate, unmanaged quote when they can take a sensational soundbite and beat someone they don’t like over the head with it. You’re stupid not to think about how you control your message in any context.
Some PR is stupid though – I’ll leave this rant with a priceless quote from a SMH story in the Binglegate case. The only winners in this case are the promoters (and perhaps Michael Clarke). Max Markson is using this opportunity to get himself on TV so every aspiring celebrity golddigger knows his name – and the best line in any of the stories surrounding the affair came from Bingle’s law firm. In a media release.
”We are not seeking publicity by this media release.”
How can you tell me a line like that is not worth a story of its own – and Crikey complains about 55%.
*A title bestowed on me by the Townsville Bulletin’s resident cynical “about town” columnist…