Saving Journalism with Jenny Taylor

In-person and online, Thursday 29 May from 17:30 - 19:00 (BST)

“Passionate, perceptive and prophetic… a clarion call to all who hunger for better public conversation” – John Wyatt, Emeritus Professor of Ethics, University College, London

KLC fellow Dr Jenny Taylor is a lifelong journalist and a pioneer of religious literacy in journalism. We are excited to host the launch of her forthcoming book, Saving Journalism: The Rise, Demise and Survival of the News.

It hardly needs pointing out how serious the consequences of the erosion of responsible, independent journalism are proving to be for society. Jenny’s book examines important topics such as the disappearance of public-service journalism, the importance of freedom of the press, and what it will take to save the Fourth Estate.

Come to hear more from Jenny and guests about the importance of telling of truer stories, and how Christianity can have a constructive public voice.

Meet our Panellists

Jenny Taylor

JENNY M. TAYLOR was Research Fellow in Communication, Media and Journalism at the Kirby Laing Centre for Public Theology in Cambridge from 2019, during which time she wrote the book being launched tonight. She worked in newspapers and magazines for several years before joining a missionary society and travelling widely in Asia and Africa. Out of these experiences, she pioneered religious literacy in journalism, founding Lapido Media in 2005 as a publicly subscribed online newspaper and publisher, read in Downing Street. The launch at Frontline was covered by the Times, the BBC, and CNN’s Correspondents’ strand. Described by historian Tom Holland as ‘groundbreaking’, it helped to change the national secular discourse by providing resources for journalists needing to ‘get religion’ in an age of globalization. Taylor earned her doctorate in religion from the School of Oriental and African Studies, with a study of the influence of Islam on secularization. She has been published many times in academic journals and the mainstream and on-line media including the Guardian, the Times and, in translation, the European press, and has addressed journalism training events for Reuters, the Press Association and the NUJ. She edited Religious Literacy: An Introduction; and co-authored Faith and Power: Christianity and Islam in ‘Secular’ Britain with Lesslie Newbigin and Lamin Sanneh (SPCK 1998 and Wipf&Stock 2005) and A Wild Constraint (Continuum 2008). An Associate of the Community of St Mary the Virgin, she now lives where she was born, in Suffolk.

Craig Bartholomew

CRAIG BARTHOLOMEW is the Director of Kirby Laing Centre. He is a native South African, and a graduate of Oxford University and the University of Bristol. He is the author and editor of numerous books, and is currently working on a multi-volume project entitled Old Testament Origins and the Question of God. Craig is Senior Research Fellow, Adjunct Faculty at Trinity College, Bristol, and supervises doctorates through them for the University of Aberdeen. Craig loves gardening, is passionate about horses and dressage in particular, and enjoys crafts and jewellery making in particular.

David Lush

DAVID LUSH is a journalist with a career spanning 40-plus years. Having trained on the Hastings Observer in southern England, he moved to Namibia in 1988 in the misguided belief that covering a civil war might lead to a job as a foreign correspondent. Instead, his reporting for The Namibian newspaper during Namibia’s momentous transition to independence took him down a very different path. In 1993, he helped set up the Media Institute for Southern Africa (MISA), which advocated on behalf of the region’s fledgling independent media sector. During the ’00’s he and four colleagues pooled their savings to launch a current affairs magazine that, for ten heady years, won awards for its journalism and was financially viable. This was at a time when the HIV/AIDS epidemic was at its peak in southern Africa, and David also led the development and rollout of participatory approaches to journalism that encouraged people living with AIDS to challenge the societal stigma and discrimination associated with the disease. In 2012, David became an advisor for IMS in Copenhagen, which supports public interest media in countries experiencing armed conflict, humanitarian crises and authoritarian rule. He now runs a media consultancy in Brighton, while also studying for a PhD through the University of Lancashire’s Media Innovation Studio: His research ‘The Value of Values’ explores ways to sustain public interest journalism in volatile media ecosystems. Together with his supervisor, Dr François Nel, David is about to publish an analysis of lessons learned from the mainstream and social media coverage of last summer’s riots in the UK, which were sparked by the murder of three children in Southport. His publications include Navigating instability: A five-phase approach to supporting exiled media. (IMS briefing paper), The News Futures 2035 Policy Brief: Citizens and the news: strategies for securing news literacy education in the UK Preston, UK: Media Innovation Studio, University of Central Lancashire, Coalitions and Coalition Building to Support Media Freedom, a PRIMED Learning Brief for the Global Forum for Media Development.

Paul Marshall

PAUL MARSHALL is Wilson Professor of Religious Freedom at Baylor University, Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom, and Senior Fellow at the Leimena Institute, Jakarta. He is the author and editor of more than twenty books on religion and politics, especially religious freedom, including recently Persecuted (Thomas Nelson, 2013), Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide (Oxford University Press, 2011), Blind Spot: When Journalists Don’t Get Religion (Oxford University Press, 2009), Religious Freedom in the World (Rowman and Littlefield, 2008). He is the author of several hundred articles, and his writings have been translated into more than twenty languages. He is in frequent demand for lectures and media appearances. Marshall holds a B.Sc. (University of Manchester), M.Sc. (University of Western Ontario), M.Phil. (Institute for Christian Studies, Toronto), M.A. and Ph.D. (York University, Toronto) with further studies in human rights at the University of Strasbourg, and theology and jurisprudence at Oxford.

Esther Lightcap Meek

ESTHER LIGHTCAP MEEK (BA, Cedarville College; MA, Western Kentucky University; PhD, Temple University) is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Geneva College and Senior Scholar at The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology. She is a Makoto Fujimura Institute Scholar, a member of The Polanyi Society, and an Associate Fellow with the Kirby Laing Centre for Public Theology.

Esther is the author of six books, most famously Longing to Know and Loving to Know. She also gives courses, workshops and talks for high schools, colleges and graduate institutions, as well as for businesses, churches, and other organizations.

Our event will take place online and in-person at Chesterton Mill, Cambridge, and attendance is free of charge.

We look forward to Jenny’s presentation and some deep discussion with our guest panellists. Sign up below and join us on Thursday 29 May from 17:30 – 19:00 (BST).

Get your copy of Saving Journalism

Until the end of June, we are offering UK friends more than 40% off the list price, both at the event and by post. Use the “Register Here” button below to book your spot at the event, or if you would like a copy sent to you, click here to go to the “Reserve a Copy” form and the publisher will email you back with details. (Please note that postage fees apply.)

Read an excerpt from Saving Journalism

I set up Lapido Media from my dining room in 2005 with one unpaid American missionary assistant and no budget. By the time it closed down, in 2017, we had raised more than £1 million in charitable funds and individual donations, employed five staff, were read in Downing Street, and were networked around the world.

Lapido means to “speak up” in Acholi, the language of Northern Uganda.

I had somehow found the nerve to make a phone call to former Sunday Telegraph editor—and, latterly, columnist for the Independent—Dominic Lawson to launch it for us. To my surprise, I got through to him direct—and, even more surprising, he agreed to help, without a clue who I was. We launched at Vaughan Smith’s prestigious Frontline Club for foreign correspondents in Paddington. We called the event “Neutrality or Truth: Reporting Religion Post-7/7”. It seemed to break the dam of reserve about how to write news in the tense aftermath of the London Underground bombings. Journalists were at that moment like rabbits in the headlights, unable to digest the recent catastrophic developments in terms of religiously motivated political violence. Multiculturalism was not supposed to be like this. Until this point, if all religions were the same, you were required to be “equal” about your coverage, which in fact meant not reporting the facts. Equality had wrongly come to mean “the same as”.

Did it mean treating the contemporary Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, as if he were hook-clawed fundamentalist Abu Hamza? Both had beards, both preached to their throngs, both could be apocalyptic.

Ludicrously, journalists honestly seemed not to know—and, if there were a difference, wasn’t it discriminatory and/or illegal to say so anyway? The event generated massive coverage in the national and international media, including half an hour on CNN’s Correspondents slot.

This was all vindication of my passionately held view that you could approach journalism from a perspective that took your own and others’ spirituality seriously, because it produced better stories. Real journalists do “get religion”, and they were often far more interested and sympathetic in private to what I was doing than people generally imagine.

It was no surprise to me then that I had an easier ride with journalists than with the Church, which—like any organization—tries to control the narrative when and where it involves them.

The rise of the free press and the “civil ideal” of the news is a story that needs fully retrieving for our time, but that has not been my task.

What I’ve tried to do is tease out those key moments when religion and the desire for freedom coalesced as a fiercer than normal passion to communicate truth—and then to show what happens when that passion loses its roots.

In reading Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual, the Guardian journalist Nicholas Lezard’s view was transformed. “Its basic principle—that the Christian conception of God provided the foundation for what became an unprecedented form of human society—is, when you think about it, mind-bending.” Indeed.

Journalism was its seed—and, if the seed seems to have died for a season, is it not time to work for it to bear fruit again?