Yesterday was my 56th birthday…

…and I got to spend it with a very lively group of colleagues: the diocesan editors. We are a motley crew and proud of it.

Once a year we gather in a pre-determined Canadian city to talk and eat and yes, drink our way through four days of professional development and silly games. This year we heard local experts talk about the importance of social media and what a good/bad job we’re doing with our papers, among other things. Then we talked about the future of the Anglican Journal and by extension, the 22 diocesan newspapers that it carries.

Will we have our jobs next year? Stay tuned, folks. Because it’s crunch time at General Synod and with 40% of staff in the national office expected to get their pink slips this fall, the way the church does business is about to undergo a radical change. How that will or will not affect the newspaper network remains to be seen.

That said, looking at the future of the Journal…and by extension their own regional newspapers…didn’t seem to faze the diocesan editors too much. To say that they’ve been through this before would not be understatement. So we talked and we got angry and we laughed and we made a plan. And then we hopped on a bus for Peggy’s Cove, Lunenberg and Mahone Bay as our reward for sitting inside for three days listening to experts rip our publications apart, tell us how to do things better, and why we need to get saavy about social media.

What did I learn? That relationships are more important than process or product. And that I’d really like to go back to Lunenberg and Mahone Bay. (Peggy’s Cove is great, but for me it’s a one-time visit…)

Oh and by the way (btw)? Twitter is not big with youth, ditto Facebook. Seems that these forms of social media at de rigeur however for anybody in the communication biz who is over 30. That definitely included the diocesan editors and me.

Kristin Jenkins is the editor of the Anglican Journal.