At one point, Moran's newspaper asked her to play the multi-player online roleplaying game "World of Warcraft" in order to write about it in a column. Moran said she quickly found it addictive. "World of Warcraft has turned my perceptions of the world upside down," she wrote. "Take, for instance, the very beginning of the game, when you decide on the character you will play.... when it's for an inconsequential Internet diversion, and you have almost infinite choice of what you will become – good, evil, male, female, human, weird minotaur thing with problem hair – it brings to the fore several profound self-realizations. My inner self, it turns out, is a beefy ginger dwarf – one with a huge beard. He is who I want to be. He is secret Caitlin. Discovering this is the kind of thing troubled celebrities pay Dr. Drew a small fortune to discover. I had done it in seven minutes, and with a choice of beard stylings, to boot."
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
