FT interview
One on one with communications expert and podcaster Joanna la Fleur
JOANNA LA FLEUR is a communications expert who hosts the Word Made Digital podcast (JoannaLaFleur.com/Podcast). She coaches churches and Christian organizations how to have a better digital presence. She spoke to Faith Today’s Karen Stiller about what Christians learned as the pandemic accelerated our shift to virtual platforms and what we can carry forward.
Faith Today: What have we learned, Joanna, from all this shifting online?
Joanna la Fleur: What we learned quickly is that what works in person doesn’t actually work as well online and vice versa. The kind of thing you might create for an online community is a very different format than what you would do in person.
I think one of the biggest mistakes we’ve made is trying to match those two things together. One of the audiences will lose. So, if you’re having a live in-person service and you’re just trying to put a camera up and bring that onto the internet, it won’t be a very good experience for those people watching online.
Think of when people moved from radio to television and these voices on radio started being seen on TV. Johnny Carson created essentially a radio set with a film camera. Even to this day a lot of these guys still have mics that don’t work, but there’s a metaphorical mic on their desk and they have a guest who sits beside them. It’s all coming out of radio that was trying to translate, adjust and adapt into a TV format.
Most shows don’t look like radio anymore. At first, with YouTube-style shows, the format was just taking what worked on TV and translating it to YouTube, but then quickly people are realizing that doesn’t work either.
We have to think of the format in which people are experiencing the content. People have hopefully figured out by now how to plug in a camera and get the internet to work and how to get the audio going.
We want to then think more strategically or holistically about what we’re creating. Is the content for the audience that we’re trying to reach in the place that they’re watching it?
If you’re in a church with a charismatic kind of a preacher, for example, who is almost larger than life, it’s very off putting if that guy is using that same energy and level, and almost yelling at you, if you’re sitting in your living room. Or you might even still be in bed on a Sunday morning watching it on your phone. It feels like a juxtaposition between where you are experiencing it and what the person is doing through the camera.
FT: Speaking of people still being in bed, do you think churches are going to have to do some work to woo people back from online-only? It’s easy to stay home on a Sunday morning now. JL: I think this is a huge question and something I’m deeply concerned about. I
“The kind of thing you might create for an online community is a very different format than what you would do in person.