Praying for Papers Offers Prayers for Newspaper Industry

Posted on May 18, 2008

Editor and Publisher reports that Mike Koehler, a sports editor for The Oklahoman, has launced a blog called Praying for Papers. The blog offers prayers for those in the industry who are losing jobs. There are also prayers to help guide the newspaper industry's leaders.

Mike Koehler, deputy sports editor at The Oklahoman, has started a new blog/Web project called www.prayingforpapers.com, designed to bring help through prayer where it is needed, as newspaper-industry challenges continue to mount.
"The goal of my site is to update visitors on who needs prayer in our business," Koehler tells E&P. "This will include recent layoffs, the business in general, as well as leaders and people with specific prayer requests. It's for Christians and non-Christians alike."

The newspaper industry has been struggling for the past several years. The most obvious solution was to go digital with online local news, blogs and web classifieds. This is the direction the newspaper industry finally took although they were slow to embrace it. However, even this path finds newspapers faced with hordes of competition from blogs, online video and independent websites.

Here's a description from Praying for Papers about what you can find on the blog.

This is a troubling time in the newspaper business. Every day we hear stories from papers that are laying off employees and struggling to stay afloat.
Our idea at Praying for Papers is to encourage anyone who is touched by this shift in our industry to include it each day in their prayer life.
This includes:
* Praying for your brothers and sisters in the business who have lost their jobs or may be in danger of losing their jobs - as well as their families.
* Prayers for the leaders of our business to do the right thing in their decision-making, having them keep in mind what Christ would do.
* Praying for the people in our business who are far from God.

One of the entries on Praying for Papers has a link to this cartoon that illustrates the problem print newspapers are facing.