Ted Olsen, Jody Veenker, and Jennifer McGuire's most frequent contribution to Christianity Today is their daily writing, editing, and design of this magazine's Web page (www.christianitytoday.com/ctmag/).
But with this bonus technology issue (which subscribers are receiving in addition to their regular issues), Ted, Jody, and Jennifer are doing something very retro indeed: producing a print magazine (what we sometimes call CT's "dead-tree edition").
The relationship between print and Internet is not as one-way as some pundits first predicted. Print magazines are not going out of existence as Web-based publications are born and (in some cases) thrive. Instead, says Ted, "It is a trend for magazines to launch Web sites and for Web sites to launch magazines." He cited Space.com's launch of Space.com Illustrated and Inside.com's launch of Inside magazine as just two examples.
CT has been in cyberspace since 1995, so we figured it was time to go beyond the occasional technology article and use an entire issue to, in Ted's words, "give special emphasis to this emerging part of the world and to its effects on the way we live our Christian lives."
Like many young adults, Ted Olsen has reaped the benefits of a wired world. Married now just three months, Ted and his wife, Alexis, carried on eight months of their courtship by e-mail while she worked with Opportunity International in Australia and he with CT in the United States. (A journalistic aside on that romance: Ted and Alexis began their friendship in 1994, as students working on the Wheaton College Record, she as editor, he as news editor.)
Before becoming CT's online managing editor, Ted spent two years as assistant editor of our sister publication Christian History. The instincts he honed there bear fruit in the historical dimension he has brought to developing articles about this very 21st-century technology. See especially "The Wireless Gospel" (p. 48), "Did Open Debate Help the Openness Debate?" (p. 42), and "Not Your Grandfather's Mission Field" (p. 58) for examples of his impulse to "look forward by looking backward."
Jennifer McGuire designs CT's daily Web publication as well as CT's sister publication Christian Reader. She has been at Christianity Today International for almost seven years and maintains her own private design business, 620 Communications.
One of Jennifer's recent forays onto the Web was occasioned by a three-year survey conducted by Knowledge Network for Stanford University. Once a week Jennifer (and thousands of others) answer wide-ranging questions (politics, shopping, religion, whatever) that come to them via Webtv, an integrated Web and television system from Microsoft. The research project provides the equipment, and Jennifer gets to use it any way she wants. The best part, she says, is simultaneously watching football games and reading her e-mail while sitting on her sofa.
Jody Veenker joined CT as its editorial resident in June 1999 and was hired as assistant online editor in July 2000. Her duties include editing and formatting news stories and providing "related elsewhere" links at the end of each story. "We try to give people access to background information on each story that way," she says. For this bonus issue, she has reported seven stories that make up the Digital Report section.
Jody calls herself "a Philistine when it comes to technology." But we think she is "an Israelite in whom is found no guile." She is currently investing her outside-the-office energies in developing women's ministries for a church-planting effort in McHenry County, northwest of Chicago.
Ted, Jody, Jennifer, and I hope you enjoy this bonus issue, and if you are not a regular reader of their online work, I hope you'll give it a try.
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