When Cohen was a student at Boston University, he secured an interview with "All My Children" star Susan Lucci after receiving a classroom assignment to do a story on one of his idols. Cohen was also doing a paper on whether Pine Valley, the setting of "Children," was an accurate representation of society, so before the interview, he stood outside the studio where the show was filmed and waited for the actors so he could ask them what they thought. "'IS PINE VALLEY AN ACCURATE REFLECTION OF SOCIETY?!' I yell at every familiar face in a high-pitched panic," Cohen wrote. "They are all initially terrified and must take a moment to process what is happening: overly hyper kid with tape recorder and 'fro yelling stupid question... Their answers are gripping: 'Not really.' 'No.' 'Maybe.'"
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.
