In their book Preaching that Connects, Mark Galli and Craig Brian Larson draw attention to the relationship be-tween homiletics and journalism.1 They are not alone in seeing this relationship. A journalist, Melvin Mencher, calls journalism "kin to teaching, cousin to preaching."2

Galli and Larson's perceptive book focuses on matters of style, relating the techniques of news writing to the task of sermon writing. There is room, however, for a fuller development of the kinship between preaching and news reporting. This article proceeds in that direction by focusing on the theory of preaching in light of the theory of journalism.

Mentors along this pathway of understanding are journalists more so than homileticians. A Philadelphia Inquirer editor is quoted as saying that while everybody else's reporters zig, he wants his to zag.3 An appeal to journalists more than homileticians on the subject of preaching is an attempt to zig rather than zag. It is not that homileticians have little or nothing to teach; it is that the zag of journalism can pull us out of the ruts we may have been digging for ourselves as preachers who reflect on the art and craft of preaching.

We can begin with the most obvious and fundamental connection: preaching -- like journalism -- is interested in the news. A news story is an attempt to provide an accurate account of some event or of some issue likely to erupt in something eventful. Not every happening is eventful enough to be classified as being newsworthy. Newsworthy events are determined by their timeliness, proximity, prominence, consequence, and human interest.

Timeliness refers to the immediacy of the event. A newsworthy event has either just happened or is about to happen. For this reason journalism has been called a rough draft of history. It gives some account of events at hand.

Timeliness includes currency as well as immediacy. Long-acknowledged truths can be timely and therefore newsworthy. They may not be immediate happenings but they may be of current interest.

For example, the 10 year anniversary of the Challenger disaster brought a flurry of reports giving accounts of that dreadful day. The facts reported were not new but they were current.

Proximity can be either geographic or psychological. Local happenings are newsworthy because they are close by; they have geographic proximity. Thus, we read in our local papers material about the city council, school board, high school baseball team, and weather forecast for the vicinity, to name but a few topics of note because of geographic proximity.

Psychological proximity makes an event newsworthy when the facts of the happening, by way of their emotional power, transcend miles and unite people across political and other boundaries. An accident involving a school bus and a semi truck in Green Bay, Wisconsin, might make national news because of the emotional pull of the story. A train wreck in India is given space in the small town papers of the United States for the same reason.