A hot issue

When people ask me, as they do fairly often, what my highest goals might be for WORLD magazine, I’ve come more and more in the last few years to respond in terms of journalistic accomplishment.

Yes, I’d like to see a circulation of 500,000. Yes, I’d love it if we had an endowment of $25 million.

But what I’d like even more is for WORLD and its staff to produce a really, really big story. Like what? Like nailing the facts about global warming. Not just someone’s well-argued opinion, but a piece so well researched and so well reported that all parties would agree that the debate is over.

Send me a note or an email suggesting the WORLD report that you would be most anxious to read.

Or this: An article so diligently explored and so conclusively reported that within minutes of its publication, everyone would know for certain that Donald Trump’s candidacy for the presidency was over.

I’m fairly confident, of course, that if WORLD became the widely quoted source for either of those accounts, or some other hot issue, we might also be well on the way to a record circulation and a steadier financial base than we’ve ever had.

So help me out. Send me a note or an email suggesting the WORLD report that you would be most anxious to read—the account that might most surprise and most intrigue folks around the world. Please keep your suggestion brief!

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It’s confession time. I’m all too aware that it’s been only three months since I invited you to write me about another subject. In WORLD’s May 16issue, I asked you in my regular column to imagine that you were managing a bakery. In come a couple of fellows who want you to bake and decorate a cake for their wedding. Keeping in mind the tone with which Jesus carried on his conversations, what thoughtful question can you direct to these would-be customers that might stimulate a friendly discussion? No sarcasm, I suggested. No put-downs or smart-aleck insults.

Since then, I reported back to you on your initial response. Never before, on any topic, had I received more than about 100 reader responses. On this topic, however, over the first month, more than 200 of you took a crack at my assignment. This was clearly a hot issue. And now, three months after I first mentioned the matter, your responses have topped 650. I am overwhelmed.

I suggested in that initial report that your responses had been pretty confusing. Now I am reporting that such confusion has continued in the hundreds of later responses. You are, as they say, “all over the map.” Most puzzling to me is the dominance, in these 650 communications, of a certain defensive spirit. I sense more worry and concern about the loss of our own rights than I do about our typical inability to reach out and communicate effectively with folks whose lifestyle is radically different from ours.

On all these matters, I wish I could find an appropriate time and setting to converse humbly and helpfully with you WORLD readers. Each of you deserves a personal response—and maybe especially the several dozen of you who sent three-, four-, and five-page essays! So far, I’ve corresponded with fewer than two dozen of you, and I’m admittedly uncertain how to move thoughtfully through more than 1,000 pages of your thoughts that I’ve scanned but not yet studied carefully.

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All this is part of what adds a special dimension to WORLD’s kind of journalism. We call you members, not mere subscribers, for a reason. You are involved, heart and soul, in what we’re doing here. You are partners of a special kind—even when I’m slow, and maybe worse than that, in answering your mail.

I’ll appreciate your patience, and especially so if you’ll take a few minutes to respond to my bold request at the start of this page!

Email jbelz@wng.org