Further to my post yesterday about the future of Church House Publishing, I said that there would be a ‘part two’ in order to cover my questions regarding the new media side of CHP’s work. So here it is!
I think the New Media side of CHP’s work is slightly different and I do want to continue the examination of recent developments by taking a good look at this side of things, however before I do that – a quick bit of history for those that don’t know.
CHP entered the world of new media in the late nineties. To say it happened ‘by accident’ wouldn’t be correct but one might say that CHP and the AC were not prepared for the success of all that was to follow at that point. Tim Anderson, an IT journalist, developer and non-stipendiary minister, approached them with the idea of publishing a software product for the planning and production of liturgy which they took up and published around 1997. Visual Liturgy, as it came to be known, took off in a way that few had expected and very quickly became the de-facto liturgical software for the Church of England.
Of course, since then Visual Liturgy has seen various versions. It has been published in other markets and, over the years, it has been a success story for the church. This isn’t me blowing my own trumpet because I was involved. Very little of that success was down to me. It’s not perfect either. I know various things we might have done better and differently, but I think it’s very fair to say that it did well and it deserved to do well.
With the publication of Common Worship, came the Common Worship website, and (if you like) the start of a new media portfolio of work for CHP. The work grew to the point where it needed dedicated staff and I was CHP’s first New Media Manager. We established an e-publishing policy for the Archbishops’ Council. Since then, the Crockford website, the revamped CHP website, Fresh Expressions DVDs, lectionary downloads for calendars plus numerous other smaller projects have all come around. Since I left to be ordained, the team has continued to build on the work I was involved in – including the publication of the subscription-based Visual Liturgy Live.
Three important things to remember in regard to CHP’s new media work are that, firstly, there was never a large central team. There’s never been more than two people involved at CHP. All these things happened through paying a number of freelancers and specialist IT companies for their services and, crucially, prevailing upon the good graces of a huge number of willing volunteers from the church who were keen to help and see things like VL really grow. In that sense, there were not huge ‘fixed costs’ like the book side.
Secondly, a very important thing to remember is that new media products are not like books in that they hang around. While you publish a book, sell it and forget about it (until it needs to be re-printed), software and websites take constant supervision. You have to deal with technical support enquiries, you have to keep the flow of information up-to-date. As time goes on, that requirement gets more and more demanding. You start with one project and things are okay. By the time you’re on project five or six, you’re looking after all of those projects (still) whilst also trying to produce new things. It’s exponential, in that sense, in terms of staff time and resources.
Thirdly, the final thing to bear in mind is that the staff CHP have in new media are specialists. While I know roughly what lots of my colleagues did ‘on the book side’, I couldn’t tell you in great detail. Indeed, they had a rough idea of what we did but I doubt they could describe the detail of our day-to-day work either. Some skills cross-over (like parts of the editorial process) but many do not. We were IT project managers and, in that sense, very odd fellows to find in a publishing company.
Turning to the future of CHP, the recent press release that I talk about at length in part one of this blog post makes no specific mention of the new media work and that has me worried. It does say that ‘liturgy’ will continue to be one of the key areas for publication but my questions on this side of things are these:
- Does Hymns Ancient & Modern have a staff compliment that includes new media specialists? In short, are they going to be able to handle managing a software project like Visual Liturgy, a subscription website like Crockford and all the rest?
- If they don’t or can’t acquire such specialists (and HA&M may not want to if they are only employed for CHP’s benefit – that will not be cost effective), what will happen to Visual Liturgy and the other new media projects?
Clearly, HA&M do have their own electronic products, not least the Church Times website and other things. What I don’t know is what set-up they have in-house for such things and what they buy in as services. Can they handle that ‘exponential’ increase in project management and the administration of existing projects alongside whatever they are doing for their own projects?
If there isn’t a central hub and the capacity to handle CHP’s potential requirements, then it seems to me highly possible that the new media side of work for CHP and the Archbishops’ Council risks being cancelled entirely because HA&M don’t take it on and the AC don’t retain their staff to do it within their (new and much smaller) CHP command structure.
Needless to say, the demise of these products (if it happened) would be a great shame… not least for the several thousand people (including me) who make use of Visual Liturgy to plan church services week by week, who make use of the Crockford website and the various other things that CHP do either online or in software. I can’t imagine the Liturgical Commission would be best pleased about VL dying either, since a lot of their control of the texts in electronic formats could potentially be lost in such a move.
This is not the apocalypse by any means. Firstly, it’s important to remember that the Church of England website is unaffected by all this and I don’t expect VL’s future will have any kind of impact on the Common Worship texts that can be found on that website but, ultimately, the texts there are not very usable – certainly not compared to Visual Liturgy. That version of the texts is, if you like, a library to reference and dip into. VL is a tool.
Secondly, if my doom-mongering does come to pass and VL does die in all this, then there clearly is demand and a will for such a tool amongst clergy and other church workers and I’m sure it would re-emerge, perhaps as an open-source project held together by many of those willing volunteers that sustained the original VL. However, VL is solely owned by the Archbishops’ Council so if the rights can’t be negotiated in some way, it might mean starting from scratch or, at the very least, working some kind of relationship to ensure that the wider church at large gets what it wants (a software product or website with texts to use and plan from) and the AC and Liturgical Commission get what they want (some form of control, particularly in regard to the dissemination of the texts in accurate and helpful forms).
There are some important questions here and some possible implications for all of us as the wider church. As Dave Walker said in commenting on my post about CHP yesterday, ‘the debate around this needs to happen’.
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17 Comments
All good questions, wannabe!
What we’re faced with here is the owners of the Church Times / SCM-Canterbury Press having almost complete control of the official voice of the Church of England.
They’ve already got Dave Walker as blogger, which — reading between the lines in his remark about finding it “really difficult to comment†on this development — means one important voice has already been effectively silenced.
Seems to me there’s a serious conflict of interest here: can the Church Times genuinely continue to offer independent reporting on the C of E when its owners control the Church’s publishing division?
The Bishops need to put strict controls in place, controls that are legally enforceable if push comes to shove, to prevent any possibility of a repeat of the debacle of the “Covenants†with the Brewers.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not likening Hymns Ancient & Modern’s owners to the Brewers. But when someone in Dave Walker’s position finds himself unable to comment on an important aspect of the inner workings of the C of E, careful questions need to be asked!
My goodness, how much time is
wastedspent on all this administration when the real call of the church is a million miles away from planning a perfect liturgical Sunday?Open source. MySQL database. Word documents. Writing your own orders of service (how un-stereotypically Anglican would that be)
Worship and service (as in acts of, not Sunday morning) don’t need rights management and software upgrades.
Phil – I think that’s reading slightly too much into Dave’s comments. Yes, he’s close to the situation but there could be all sorts of reasons why he is finding it tricky to comment at the moment.
Andy – sounds nice but I don’t think it’s as simple as that. And for many clergy (and other people involved in worship planning), tools like VL save them oodles of time. They also help to ensure accuracy of texts which is not just about ‘perfect’ liturgy but about good theology and ‘well-formed’ worship. However, I digress off the main point here in going into that particular argument
David, I do hope so. But whether or not I’m right about Dave’s reticence, I remain concerned about the ability of the Church Times to maintain an independent voice if their owners also own the official voice of the CofE. Safeguards are needed.
Some clarifications on my own position:
I’m freelance rather than an employee. No-one is telling me what I can or cannot comment on.
Having said that Hymns Ancient and Modern is a major client of mine. In the same way that a bookshop manager (for instance) would not blog about one of their customers, or a member of the clergy about one of their parishioners I tend not to blog about my clients. Hence my ‘difficult to comment’ remark. If I had things to say to Hymns A&M on the topic (which I don’t at the moment) I’d do so by some other means than via blog comments.
Perhaps I should have remained entirely silent, but I do think that David has a unique perspective when it comes to this subject, and as he doesn’t self-promote himself as much as some of us do I thought posting the link on Twitter and a quick ‘A good post – thank you’ comment were in order.
Dave, thanks for the clarification. My apologies for misreading, and I for one am glad you didn’t remain silent: this is indeed a debate that needs to happen. An event of this magnitude shouldn’t be allowed to simply slip by unremarked by the trade or the Church we’re here to serve.
Chipping in with what might be a thick question/thought, so please excuse the ignorance or idiocy!
Given you mention the rising time that goes with increasing new media projects and their maintenance utilising increasing staff time, outside agencies, and therefore maintenance and upkeep costs, one wonders how much of the ‘loss’ is due or attributable to these things or forms part of the percentage of this?
Because if we say that we are investing in these initiatives and schemes that develop and increase clergy time and add an educational benefit – well wouldn’t that be a good thing and in effect well worth a loss for CHP?
and something that if perhaps was moved out of the CHP budget and into say mission or some such might well have been acceptable as a development spend?
of course for all I know there may have been an offset against this, but if not then might it also have made a difference to the profit/loss balance that would therefore mean CHP could stay as the independent and well respected sphere of publishing that it has been to date?
And also would mean it could keep on all of the very excellent staff that could currently be looking at a potentially bleak future?
Melanie – in my humble opinion, a large measure of CHP’s ‘loss’ each year is down to the ‘service’ functions that they perform. That’s kinda my point.
Not just the administration and support for their electronic products, but their involvement on various in-house CofE projects and, indeed, publishing some books for the AC that are never going to be able to make money because the potential readership is never going to be very big. They are all part of that ‘service’ function; that financial cost that CHP bears on the AC’s behalf.
The core underlying question for the AC is how do you choose to quantify the value that you get from CHP. In this decision and in the last decade or more, the primary and possibly only criteria has been the bottom line. My argument is that there is far more to quantify the contribution of CHP to the Church of England than just the bottom line.
I think they do a phenomenal job to get so close to break-even in a difficult market. They ought to be applauded for their achievements in how close they get to those targets and how many good products they serve up for us, but instead they find themselves criticised centrally and now their function outsourced for not hitting the (near impossible) financial target. It does gall me that no recognition is given to all the other (admittedly very hard to define) qualitative criteria by which they might be judged.
Dear David,
I know I’ve posted this on the VL mailing list, but thought I would also put my comments here.
As a longtime VL user (1.0!) I read your blog with interest. I had already heard of the outsourcing option for CHP and wondered myself what this might mean for VisLit.
Some immediate reactions:
a) I’ve had a sinking feeling for a couple of years that VisLit was on the way out and the proposed changes at CHP do nothing to allay those fears.
b) There is a huge nettle to be grasped. VisLit has lost that sense of enthusiasm it once had. I have lost count of the number of people I know who have either stopped using it altogether or else use it in a rather minimalistic way, with plenty of gripes about its shortcomings. I can’t remember the last time I spoke to someone who was in any way enthusiastic about it. The only future for VisLit is if more ministers and parishes buy into it – but at the moment even I struggle to find
reasons to encourage people to buy it.
c) I, too, have wondered whether an “open source” project might end up being the way forward. But I have to say that I’m not optimistic about this (even if CHP were to allow it to happen). I really don’t know that there are enough people out there with the skills AND the enthusiasm and time to make such a project work.
The advantage of such a project is that it would (hopefully) mean that the future development of the software was more in the hands of those who use it day by day. One of my personal gripes about the past few years is that the needs and wishes of those who actually use VisLit in the parishes have pretty much been ignored. You could add to that the fact that one of VisLit’s strongest features (multiple themes/indexing) has been almost totally ignored by recent issues (ie Times and Seasons). Putting control in the hands of the users could change all that and make VisLit much more attractive to users and potential users.
d) Your questions for General Synod are indeed very pertinent. Just what IS the future for VisLit? Does anyone have a clue?
Let me introduce myself, I’m the electronic liturgical officer in the Church of Ireland. I got the title when i was enlisted to develop the Church of Ireland Module of VL4.
As such i have intimate knowledge of how VL works. During David’s tenure in CHP along with imogen we (the Church of Ireland) had an excellent relationship. However, since David’s departure for ordination, that relationship has gone sour. Emails are unanswered, phone calls not replied to, even a letter from our liturgical commission has failed to get a response.
It has been clear VL was not getting the resources it needed either financially or work hours. I’m not sure that David’s successor ever got the concept of VL!
In Ireland we have lost faith in CHP and VL as things stand, i hope for a damascus road conversion which shows chp the way forward. This is not aimed at Tim A by the way. I don’t know how he keeps things going.
Like some others i offered by assistance with the development of VL i’m still waiting…..
There are a number of us who have been faithful disciples of VL and have struggled to spread the gospel of VL but without support from CHP i fear we will be martyrs to those who don’t like VL and will tell us – told you so
Having read through all David G’s analysis and all the comments, and as a member of the one-time Visual Liturgy Task Group, I’ve got to say that his analysis and questions are spot on in both posts. He could have let it get personal but he has kept a remarkable detachment, and his insider knowledge only adds power to the argument. The issues that are surfacing are ones which frequently came up in discussions among the VLTG members a couple of years ago, and I don’t imagine anyone from that group will be especially surprised by what has happened. Saddened, but not surprised in the least.
It is sad too to read David C and Alan R’s comments. VisLit was poised to move to the next level, but in a sense it needed to be set free for that to happen. The question is where we go from here, and Dave’s kicked off the discussion. The vision, the talent and the knowledge are all out there still. I feel sure a whole host of conversations will now start taking place, and maybe, just maybe…
VL is such an amazing resource. It is used regularly by so many people, but can still reach out further to many more given the funding, support and backing it deserves.
It is surely one of the few current success stories of the C of E.
As one who has used VL ever since it first appeared, I have valued it as an important tool in the liturgical side of my ministry. I upgraded to VL Live as soon as it became available. I have appreciated each new module as it has become available. It has disappointed me that the development appears from a user’s point of view to have dried up. I am sad to find ,yself wondering what my current subscription is earning for me. A module I had expected but which has failed to materialise is the daily office lectionary. Yes, I can download daily prayer each day, but it would be a real boon to have it all on tap in VL Live.
VL Live allows me to work quickly and efficiently in preparing regular services, reader rotas and much more in quick time (meaning that I can spend more time on other aspects of ministry including sermon preparation etc.. Bearing in mind the increasing shortage of clergy, VL surely is a good financial investment for the CofE as a whole and a service to the church.
I would be happy to pay more to ensure that VL continues to develop in various ways to improve its usefulness, but I also believe that there is a strong argument for central funds supporting it as well.
I urge that consideration nof outsourcing of CHPs work including VL Live will ensure that the need to keep VL Live able to service and support the ongoing development of liturgy to serve the church today and in the future in a world where ICT becomes increasingly vital if the chuirch is to be taken seriously.
I have used Visual Liturgy consistently ever since it first appeared and have found it hugely helpful in producing weekly printed orders of service and PowerPoint displays for use in church. On a quarterly basis it provides me with the means to efficiently give our newsletter people the data they need for the weekly pew sheets: Sundays, Collects, PCPs, and readings.
It is extremely useful having a range of resources easily available in one place to be simply selected (e.g. Collect or Additional Collect; Creedal options; introductions to the Lord’s Prayer; etc, etc; and, automatically listed at the end, a copyright statement applicable to the selections and choices made.
Not to continue to provide and further improve this invaluable resource would in my opinion be a sad step back. Please, CHP and AC, continue to give it the support it requires and many clergy and congregations deserve.
I agree that these questions are so important. I am particularly concerned that further development of Visual Liturgy seems to have stopped, and support is in danger of being cast adrift altogether. I have asked my local GS member to ask questions of the Archbishops’ Council. Peter
VL should be a brilliant database, but on the whole hasn’t been kept up to date when new liturgy has been issued, thus limiting its usefulness. A proposed midi file link, present in an earlier version, has not been implemented, again limiting usefulness. Thematic indexing is patchy, and title indexing is inconsistent, thus making material difficult to retrieve — it can be simpler to go to the PDFs. Some full texts of hymns, available as an add-on in an earlier version, is not now included. So near yet so far.
Ah, it‚’s all my fault! When I was head of Church House Publishing from 1995 to 2005 I tried to identify suitable success criteria for CHP. Resourcing the church, encouraging best practice and enabling mission were high up on the list. I also set us the target of making a profit for the Church. Until then CHP had always been subsidised – presumably because its work was recognised as being of “value” to the mission of the Church.
For a few years we succeeded in turning in a profit and of course everyone said thank you very much. My memory is that we banked around £400,000 when we closed the Common Worship accounts.
Perhaps I was unrealistic and set a profit target that has been unsustainable long-term.
The question therefore is what level of financial subsidy, if any, is appropriate now to sustain the contribution that CHP currently makes to the life of the Church. Is the answer zero? Presumably Synod in July will be able to discuss how the AC budget is prioritised?
The likelihood is that we will see far fewer CHP publications each year to resource the church. And I bet they will still require a financial subsidy.
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[...] thing that all this probably doesn’t cover is the New Media aspect of CHP’s work and I’ll cover that in the second blog post since it is really a very different area with very different [...]
[...] is just a brief addendum to my two much longer posts about the future of CHP’s book and new media work [...]
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