I first met David Crumm on Assignment Zero. As a religion reporter for the Detroit
Free Press for 25+ years, he came into the experiment with 30 or more
sources that joined our project right away. He was one of the more
successful editors in Assignment Zero who, despite technical glitches,
kept his sources motivated by finding a common ground. Every week he
emailed everyone and explained how they could contribute.

In a recent phone conversation Crumm told me that AZ was a rich
experience for him and his sources as well. At the time Crumm was still working
for the Detroit Free Press and working on a side blog Spirit Scholars. Since the project, however, Crumm has left the DFP and is now working on his own religion website, Read the Spirit.

The new site is also about creating a community of readers who engage with content, which Crumm believes is "the future of our enterprise." So
this installment of Lessons from Reporters is all about Crumm – our
honorary religion beat blogger.

So what exactly do you do to cover religion with a network?

Well, there are a lot of social networking sites, all the way from the
Moby Dick of them all, Facebook, YouTube and MySpace, which are unrestrained in terms of first-person networking, but the chief
difference in this emerging field is to have a central voice at the
helm of the network. I’ve been talking to a lot of semi-web producers who I think are
all moving in the same direction. For example, I know somebody who has
recently started a successful religion blog that networks a bunch of
people and he is very
successful, having already integrated multi-media. But the feedback from
his readers is that they want a central voice that will guide them.
They want a fresh voice in the morning that gives them a feeling of
continuity and makes them feel like there is a balance in the ship,
that they are in a safe community.

We use a voice at ReadTheSpirit that is a little Garrison Keeler-ish.
I will occasionally refer to the home office in Michigan, I’m a little
folksie with people. The other thing that we’ve heard very strongly
also is this notion that they want a safe place. Our mantra is "great
curiosity and great respect."

I do know that on some sites the culture is wild west and people love
it. I’m not for one minute saying those shouldn’t exist. But on our
site, because the content we deal with is faith, the community wants a
safe site.

As a result – to post on our site you’ve got to take two steps. First,
give us your name and email and the second is a captcha. We also have a
publish button before anything goes live.

Tell me about the ways people contribute.

We actually get very few comments. What many of us get are emails.
On every single post there is a direct email link and I always get a
few comments and even more emails. I often say to people, why don’t you
comment? They often say they don’t have time – but they’ve already
written me an email.

It is an interesting phenomena, that discussion is very rich and it’s
very real, but it doesn’t seem to happen in public. You don’t flip the
switch and all the sudden it happens on the site and you sit back and
watch it unfold. It comes through a central office, the reporter.

Any advice to other beat bloggers?

There are several things. Let me say again that I don’t think everybody
ought to have a safe space. I have friends who are fans of pro-sports
teams – and part of the fun is being able to trash talk. In an area
like ours, with faith, maybe medical issues – it works best when a safe
space is maintained

Other things you can do: I took a fellowship in 2001-02 and when I came
back to the Detroit Free Press everything I did after that changed.
Prior to it I covered religion the way you’d cover business. Afterwards
I realized that religion is about the everyday issues in people’s lives. Rather
than cover it from the top down, cover it from the bottom up. Be very
careful about balance: I am aware of how big the circle is in our
family which is geographic across the globe and spread amongst various
religions. Rely on your readers to help you find that balance: Just
three days ago we had some Muslim readers point that that we hadn’t
covered anything on the Hodge yet. "Where is the Hodge" they asked. I
slapped my forehead. I sent emails back, "Thank you! I apologies, I
almost forgot, so tomorrow we will have a piece on the Hodge."

What does your site run on?

By the time we had launched ReadTheSpirit.com we had worked for a whole
year on Spiritscholars, which was like our sandbox. Everything we ran
across told us that for journalists, for writers, the goal should be to
find the easiest most dependable and flexible tool you can find and use
it. A lot of people come at it with this idea to build a website and
use a pile of money creating it from the ground up. If you do that, you
get lost in the minutia. You learn things you don’t need to learn. We
use Typepad [editor: so does BeatBlogging.org]. What we like about it
is – it is reasonably inexpensive. The tech guy who works with me is a
long time internet software developer and he has taken the Typepad and
done CSS work to redesign the look of the site and modify spaces. It’s
easy, powerful, durable and we’ve never had it down and it allows for a
lot of cooperative work with other people through widgets.

People on our site could care less about the technical side of it. We
have never referred to our site as a blog, even though it is. We never
refer to them as posts, they are "stories." We use a Garrison Keller
model of voice – out of our home office every day we are working with a
whole community around the world who are telling us the kind of stuff
they want to read. Sometimes we make mistakes but we are trying to surprise you and give you something new that is fun to read. That’s the
language we use and what people respond to…someone who speaks to you
in an honest intimate way.

Talk to me in two years and things might be different. Right now, I’m
talking to you about instincts and the initial data that we are
getting. It isn’t about the geewhiz tech side of the web. It’s about answering
the big questions. They will beat a path to you whether you are a
blogger or sending it by carrier pigeon.

It’s the content that matters. So as you are having
people work in this arena they should know it’s all about the voices
and the content, don’t wast time on anything else that distracts you
from the voice and the content.

I know email is a powerful tool for you. Tell me about how you use it. 

We will send out links, quizzes and other things in a two page email
fairly regularly. We actually have two differnet email lists segmenting
them to
different groups. We are not super-sophisticated about our email list.
Every week we send out approximately 2000 emails in four thematic
segments. We have a core group, people that we judge to have had some
direct contact with us, comments, reviews, took a quiz, etc, and the
other three groups are wildly grouped around other principels. We try
to keep the emails to them very simple – real personal. And we get
about 2-3 unsubscribe requests a week.

I do calls to the readers via email all the time. There are two full
time partners in this venture. Then there are those we count as our
network which is about 150 nationwide. They range from a women who we
pay as a freelance copyeditor to others who have done some pieces for
us, like a documentary filmmaker. The emails help us cross promote what
everybody is doing. My list of contacts is about 2,000 people and then
sometimes they spread the word further and in truth, it’s more powerful
for them to do the pass along. We could see days when they passed along
the links. In the emails I’ll intentionally og in and say "hey, today
we are going to share some of the recomendations that you sent in and I
took a look at and I think are great. Here is a great book on this, and
TK over here in Pitsburg sent in some items here. Things like that. In
one example: A prominent public school educator and leader of the
Jewish community wanted help developing a curriculum on understanding
faith and diversity – but she was having trouble. So I put out an
appeal to our readers and we are still getting recommendations for that.

We use creative commons very seriously. We set the threshold low – just
include a byline and the website and you can republish anything and we
actively tell people to take our stuff.