As part of a new morning "routine" (now about a month old, so gettling close to being a habit), I listen to the Audible.com version of highlights from the Wall Street Journal during working out and then read the New York Times (well, skim most articles and read some) on my Kindle during breakfast.
Ran across two very interesting articles today that I want to do some thinking about. First, from the New York Times an article about "hyperlocal" news sites. In some ways this is taking what my son, Eric, has been doing with BlogDowntown and going even more granular.
One of the things, in my opinion, that has been keeping many local churches from really getting involved with the web, especially for outreach, is the "global scope" of a web site. If I feel that I'm called to reach a one-mile radius around my church, but more than half of the responses to my web site are coming from another country, I won't really view the web as a primary means of fulfilling my call. But if there are ways (mostly strategic, not technical) to make my site really a "go to" site hyper-locally, then it may be a tool that dramatically impacts the fulfilment of my vision.
The second article is a fascinating editorial in today's Wall Street Journal, "Making Old Media New Again." The author makes the point that maybe the "role" for print publication is not the news (what happened yesterday), but the analysis (what does this mean for tomorrow). He ties this together with the aspect of local emphasis (why publish a paper in New York that could just as well have been published in Chicago).
Putting these two streams of thought together, I think, could provide some interesting paths for churches and ministries as part of their use of the Web. Will be fun to do some thinking about this.