Let me apply these three questions to my two areas of responsibility: National Right to Life News and Today’s News & Views. The answers will be different, and since the answers are not the same, what you find in these two sources of information will complement one another. For the record, you need them both!

NRL News has been in business since November 1973. I’ve edited it since September 1981. If you are not a subscriber, you ought to be. (Call 202-626-8828.)

For many years it was almost the only pro-life publication. It remains indispensable reading.

A quarter-fold newspaper that goes out to 364,000 readers by third-class non-profit mail, what is its business? It’s to cover every facet, every dimension of NRLC's enormous outreach, a daunting task, by the way.

For the next four years at the top of the business "to do" list is to monitor the Obama Abortion Agenda. We also need to keep people apprized of what Planned Parenthood and its ilk is up to. NRL News must provide insight and background into what’s going on legislatively in Washington, D.C. and in the states.

Our “business” is also offering stories of encouragement. The newspaper will offer lighter fare and especially human interest stories.

Who is the customer? For the most part pro-lifers, but not exclusively so. I’m occasionally surprised when I see a recognizable pro-abortion name on the mailing list. My audience is almost entirely North Americans, principally from the USA, although I do have subscribers from as far away as Australia.

Many but by no means all readers of the newspaper tend to older. And by older I mean roughly 40 and up. That demographic is still passionately attached to reading newspapers. So it makes sense that articles will tend to be longer and in more depth.

I’ve already begun to describe what NRL News’s customer values/wants. They value information in bulk. They want to be able to address everything from abortion through euthanasia to health care reform to the debate over stem cells. And they believe that in the battle of facts and figures and arguments and advocacy, if they can defeat their opponents, it moves us down the road to restoring legal protection to unborn babies and protecting the medically vulnerable.

Today’s News & Views is an entirely different animal. TN&V goes out daily, and sometimes more than once a day. It does not depend on the eagerness of Postal Service to deliver the publication to someone’s home. It’s there in your email box within an hour of the time I send it to be posted.

NRL News competes with lots of other items in the mailbox, but TN&V competes with cyberspace. One may be crowded, but the other is close to infinite.

TN&V’s business is both different and the same as NRL News’s. It’s the same in the sense of educating our readership, empowering them to do battle in an hostile environment, and making them share a sense of camaraderie. But it’s different in that everything is so, so, so much quicker. People expect to be informed virtually in real-time.

For example, when the Supreme Court decision came down a couple of years ago upholding the ban on partial-birth abortions, I knew I had to have something up within two hours. Over the next few days I wrote a ton of different analyses of what had happened.

Who is TN&V’s customer? Way younger, very computer-savvy, impatient with stuff that goes on and on and on. They also want to interact (virtually instantaneously), which is why I ask for comments with each and every edition. They are social-networkers, which means that everything that’s posted will be referenced on Facebook or Twitter.

What does TN&V’s customer value/want? They want to know the latest-latest on everything; they value being able to debate their college roommates; they want to be able to look at the same core life issues through a different lens; and they would scoff at anything which couldn’t be sent along to everybody and his uncle.

I am extremely lucky to be able to have a hand in two so very different outlets. But, in fact, NRL News and TN&V are just a small part of the total NRLC package. That means that the really good parts of this workshop are about to start with Lisa Andrusko and Jonathan Rogers talking about the NRLC webpage–www.nrlc.org. 

Please send your comments and questions to daveandrusko@gmail.com.