Friday, January 20, 2017

What's The Audience?

Houston has recently sent out two glossy brochure-like publications, the 2016 Year In Review and the Pastoral Letter A Pledged Troth. Along with the press release written by Mr Jesserer Smith, this clearly represents a new approach in OCSP communications.

My regular correspondent attributes this to Ms Faber, the recent Vice-Chancellor and Director of Communications and Strategic Planning, and suggests that the prior house organ, the Ordinariate Observer, has gone by the board. I've observed already that glossy brochures aren't a new-media approach to publicity and don't seem to be consonant with such successful current Catholic efforts as those from Michael Voris or Fr Z.

However, my correspondent notes that the Pledged Troth letter has excited quite a bit of old-media notice, in The Catholic Herald, where Bp Lopes's face smiles out at us grandly upstaging Msgr Newton, in the NCR, in Crux, and via the Catholic News Agency.

Our best estimate, published many times here, is that OCSP membership is somewhere in the low four figures, and as of this year, the total number of parishes, quasi-parishes, and groups-in-formation is declining. So Bp Lopes is clearly playing to an audience outside the OCSP, and much bigger. At what point will he simply leave the OCSP behind? On the other hand, glossy brochures and press releases authored by old-media hacks are not the way to build a name for oneself in a contemporary environment.