Bruce Vilanch, a writer for awards shows such as the Oscars, the Emmys, and the Grammy Awards, said that despite what viewers might think, the joke-writing process before the ceremony itself airs is incredibly intensive. "Billy Crystal came up with the idea of creating a huge playbook, almost like a football team would use for a big game," he said. "The script itself is 300 pages. It's a big hefty tome, and it's kept offstage, generally offstage left. The host will leaf through it during commercial breaks. It's mostly based on what might happen during the broadcast.... You study who's nominated to win all the awards, the movies these people are associated with, everything that's necessary to come up with jokes. A ton of research.... Out of the hundreds [of jokes] that we write – really hundreds – if one or two are used, it's a big deal."
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.
