Holmes, Farrand help churches get more communication savvy
by Jonathan Dozier

Two journalism faculty members have created a project that could eventually train nonprofit organizations across the country in communications and convergence.

“We are teaching people how to tell their story and tell it well,” said Cecile Holmes, journalism assistant professor, one of those behind The Media and the Message seminar that could become an ongoing series.

Along with graphics instructor Scott Farrand and then graduate student Jane Barwick, Holmes spearheaded the first one-day pilot seminar more than two years ago with 21 clergy and lay leaders who wanted help harnessing the power of media.

Since then, grants from the S.C. Humanities Council and the Lilly Endowment have helped them to experiment with other formats and locations: a twoday regional seminar covering South Carolina, North

Carolina and Georgia; three 90-minute sessions in Texas; and a live, four-hour distance education seminar in partnership with Clemson University.

Most recently, in June, the group tailored its program for the Episcopal Diocese of Upper South Carolina, Holmes said.

She and Farrand each came to the idea behind The Media and the Message along different paths.

Farrand said he saw the problem while sitting in church: “I’m looking at my newsletter, going, ‘This is awful. What’s wrong here?’”

By asking some questions, he realized the church staff had no formal training in mass communications “despite the fact that it’s a large portion of what they have to do, to share opinions and theory and ideology,” he said.

For Holmes, former religion editor at the Houston Chronicle, the project grew from repeated occasions over the years when religious groups asked her for advice and assistance in getting their news heard.

She said religious and nonprofit groups deal with some of the same problems newspapers and broadcasters do in reaching busy, distracted audiences.

“The days of preaching a good sermon and offering a set of good Sunday school classes and a church social occasionally, of doing only that, are long over,” she said.

Especially when targeting teens and young adults, churches are finding that technology plays a vital role in reaching hearts and minds, Holmes said. For example, people interested in contemporary worship featuring Christian rock music are also more likely to visit a church Web site and download streaming audio recordings.

Mistrust of media on the part of clergy and misunderstanding of religious matters by reporters also make it difficult for the two sides to work together, which they often need to do, Holmes said.

Since the project began in July 2001, survey data collected by the team shows that many who attend take the message of The Media and the Message to heart.

About two-thirds of those who responded from the first two S.C. seminars said they had acquired new communications equipment, such as digital cameras, computers and DVD players, and more than three-quarters said they had improved their Web sites. At least half had done some advertising, and almost all reported getting some press coverage of their news.

The data also showed that 58 percent of former participants were eager for more training in communication technology.

“I think we’ve established the model,” Holmes said. “I think the question now is what is the best way to get the model out to the people who need it – what’s the best method of transmission.”

Farrand hopes to write a book that would give churches and other nonprofits a basic guide to using media. Topics would include desktop publishing of newsletters, use of color and type, shooting photographs, working with printers and developing a Web site. “They don’t get this in seminary school,” said Farrand, who is working with a publisher.

Holmes would like to write a book outlining the basic lessons of The Media and the Message. But while a book could reach more people, the fun of the project is in faceto- face interactions with those who come to the seminars, she said. “Istill think we might want to do the seminars," she said.

"Maybe we could train the trainers.  I don't know.  My vision hasn't gone that big yet."

From journalist to street vendor and back again
Gilman finds his fortune as magazine editor

by Sharmin Barnes Will

His resume is varied – reporter for the Beaufort Gazette and several Connecticut newspapers, freelancer, writer for a retail industry magazine, editor of national publications, street vendor, waiter.

Count those last two as “real world” training for Hank Gilman, especially for his most recent positions at the venerable Fortune magazine. Not that he aspired to street vending or table waiting, but no doubt they’ve helped him better understand what he edits today.

If you flip open the current Fortune issue to the editorial masthead, that’s Gilman in the No. 2 slot, deputy managing editor. Pretty good for a 1975 news-editorial graduate, you say, at the “leading biweekly business magazine” (so states its Web site) with a worldwide circulation of 1 million plus and known for its annual ranking of the 500 largest corporations.

“I would never recommend anyone to follow my career path,” he said in a recent email interview.

But that first job in Beaufort was likely the best, he said. “I got to cover everything from Port Royal politics to the Miss U.S.A. pageant.”

After Beaufort, he worked for two Connecticut papers. He recalled learning at the Journal Inquirer in Manchester “how to quickly write and report for two different editions of a daily newspaper. I don't think I did it very well, but there you have it.”

He said that after about a year of covering small-town planning commission and board of education meetings, he was ready to move on.

Then came those career diversions. He spent several months working with a roommate “who was, essentially, a street peddler.”

“Every week he had a crew who would load up vans filled with housewares and head to Washington, D.C., office and government buildings. We handed out price lists in the morning and set up tables at lunch. I was very good at selling Bibles and watches,” Gilman said.

That got old, and he returned to his hometown of Boston to freelance and wait on tables. Those tables turned when he saw a New York Times ad for a company looking for business writers. That led to a writing job for Chain Store Age magazine, which covers the retail industry.

“As you might have figured out by now, I have a short attention span,” Gilman wrote in his e-mail.

Two years later, he wrote to The Wall Street Journal “telling them what I did for a living, and apparently the paper needed a retail writer – talk about good timing – and hired me.” He spent from 1984 to 1988 at the Journal, also covering technology.

Four years at the Boston Globe came next, followed by Newsweek magazine as the senior editor leading an award-winning business coverage staff. In 1996, he was hired as a Fortune editor and within a year was given what’s now called FSB – Fortune Small Business – to run (likely calling on his former “non-journalistic” skills). This summer, he returned to Fortune proper as the deputy managing editor.

Add in his serious consideration for the dean’s position of what was to become the College of Mass Communications and Information Studies (he eventually decided to withdraw and stay put), and you can appreciate his credentials even more.

About his USC days, Gilman said he enjoyed “being around like-minded people in the journalism program, especially folks like Pat McNeely, Perry Ashley and Henry Price who really got you jazzed about the business.”

Price remembers Gilman well. “Teachers can sometimes predict success for their students. I think all of us who taught Hank Gilman had a gut feeling that he was going to be a major achiever. It’s nice when your predictions work out,” the retired professor and dean said.

Gilman and his wife, Catherine Johnson, have three children: Kevin, 13; Edward, 8; and Kyle, 4, and he enjoys playing guitar with them. Besides his family, he said his focus is “working hard to keep Fortune at the top of the business magazine field.” He says he still enjoys rock concerts and loves taking his children to their hockey games.

He describes his day-to-day responsibilities at Fortune this way: “Along with the managing editor, Rik Kirkland, I get involved in every aspect of Fortune’s editorial operations: from managing the staff to story selection to planning future issues to the approval of pictures to the headlines that appear on the cover of the magazine.”

And he probably has a soft spot for those scrappy guys hawking the handbags and sunglasses down on New York City’s Canal Street. They, too, might be on their way to fame and "fortune," as Gilman could attest.

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