Word watch: “Norg”

It’s the name of an old village in the Netherlands with a 13th century church, five brinks, and two windmills.

It’s also a word meaning “news organization,” recently coined as a cooperative place, a truce in the war if you like, between news bloggers (the internet) and “mainstream” media, and brought into public parlance by “Norg: The Unconference” held at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communication last fall.

For me, this latest amalgam is a pleasant sounding word, and a very cheering one too, as much for its larger associations as its specific meaning. That’s because of the context in which I first heard it.

I was in a workshop at the Canadian Church Press (CCP) conference in Winnipeg, May 4–6. Bob Cox, editor of the Winnipeg Free Press, was presenting on “Walk the line: are you leading or following?”

We all knew the sides of the line. When editors and other communication types get together, there are (to change the metaphor) two winds that blow.

One is enthusiasm for all things internet along with pronouncements (many of them true) about how print media are losing ground and how “everyone” (at least those younger than Douglas Coupland) is getting their news, entertainment, and connections on the web.

The other is the caution expressed by those still attached to words on paper, along with a few (though perhaps less compelling) predictions that trees shouldn’t relax just yet.

Both buzz and anxiety are inevitable. If the invention of papyrus (about 2800 BC) aroused turmoil, why not the advent of communication by telegraph, telephone, radio, television, personal computer, internet, and their ever-evolving variations, all in less than 200 years?

Bob Cox told us how he is responding to the changing climate of communication. He’s trying to build an online Free Press as a separate entity. On the print side, he’s turned the front page into photos and headlines/signage (no text) – a “point and click” approach – and strengthened reader participation, both features of internet communication.

This doesn’t mean he’s enamored with the internet. Not all who have “seized” the medium are responsible, he said. “The current internet path leads . . . to confusion. It’s dangerous.”

Cox insisted there is still “a serious role of ideas, of validating facts” for journalists, a role of responsibility. And this, it seems, is also the impetus behind “norg.”

Norg, it is said, may sever news from paper but its intentions are about content, literacy, credibility, interactivity, and the hope of combining “small news gathering entities” into something that does what solid, ethical journalism has always tried to do.

It’s easy, of course, to be cynical about the media, but I was inspired by Cox’s account.

Communication, whether at the Herald, where I happen to work, or in our churches and homes, needs to walk the line between old media and new; it needs to address shifting expectations. But the matter still comes back to responsibility, to content, to a set of serious values, not to mention an unchanging message of good news, even as we twist it into new forms.

When I hear “norg,” then, I’ll think about change, but also about remaining rooted in our mission of community and biblical integrity.

“Good words are worthy of our labour,” said Doug Koop, editor of ChristianWeek, in another session of the CCP conference. “They do endure.” Some of them, perhaps, as long as an old village in the Netherlands.

—Dora Dueck