Ask the Editor: WORLD’s balance of coverage

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Friday, September 6th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Coming up next, Ask the Editor. Here is Executive Producer Paul Butler.

PAUL BUTLER: After our recent profile of the Black’s Law Dictionary editor, long-time listener Tom Chapman from Acworth, Ga., had a question for me. Here’s what he writes:

I've always appreciated the little stories of personal interest, people who do interesting jobs, and other shorts. It is encouraging to hear how God calls people to so many different ways to serve Him. Over the last couple of weeks, I seemed to notice a trend of these stories not necessarily having a faith component and no mention of God.

Am I perhaps incorrect in thinking this is a recent trend or does this reveal a shift in your reporting? I would rather be incorrect than to think that WORLD would take the focus off of presenting stories that relate back to how believers are making a difference in "the world and everything in it".

Thank you and God Bless you.

Tom, thanks for your encouraging note and your question.

To answer your question most directly, there has not been an intentional shift. Our commitment has always been to highlight interesting stories on everything God has made in this world. WORLD’s founder Joel Belz set that course early. That our organization would be committed to a theology of God’s purpose, design, and will in all things. Some Christian news organizations focus on God’s obvious work in the world…gospel outreach through the local church, missionaries, and non-profit ministries. We don’t want to neglect news from those areas, but we also cover much more than those as we believe all that the world contains belongs to God. There are a lot of interesting things in this world that don’t have what some call a clear faith component … and we don’t want to invent or force one. We acknowledge—and highlight—common grace in our world.

That said, your question motivated me to go back and actually look at the data and analyze the last three months. I categorized each human interest feature into two broad categories: those that explicitly mentioned God, the scriptures, or faith … and those that didn’t. Here’s what I found. In July there was a spike in the number of stories that weren’t overtly faith-based. While most months include only a few, we had nine such segments that month. Looking at June, July, and August features together, there were seventeen total pieces that were more “general interest,” while there were twenty four clearly faith related.

That got me curious, how does that compare to the same period a year ago? In 2023 we had nine pieces that were general interest and thirty pieces that were overtly Christian in approach and topic. So that is a measurable difference. But it doesn’t signal a shift. The stories that came in from our reporters this past July just happened to be more general interest.

Besides our theological reasons for including more general interest stories in our lineup…there is another reason for doing so. I see these sorts of stories as outreach. There are a lot of unethical journalists today. We want to expose our broader society to reporters who are righteous, redeemed, and committed to truth…who treat people with respect and dignity. Covering these more general interest stories gives us the opportunity to spread the salt and light just a little broader. And if I’m honest, I also want to do a little fishing. By talking with and reporting on people who aren’t usually in our circles, not only are they exposed to our brand of Christian journalism, they may also share our stories on social media and introduce WORLD to audiences that aren’t already looking for it. And I hope that they’ll stick around for our more overt stories…praying that it’ll prove to be life-changing information, education, and inspiration.

For WORLD, I’m Paul Butler.

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