Communications Systems
I think we neglect effective and impactful communication at our peril
I’ve been thinking quite a lot about systems of communication recently. Both in the world at large, and within our Gentle Craft.
I can spend five minutes on the web and learn everything I need to know about the latest happenings with Trump and Harris. Kennedy too for that matter. I can do the same with the expanding war in the Middle East, and the revolts in Venezuela and the United Kingdom.
But, in most cities in America, I can’t do the same thing with my local elected officials. Or the problem of the day facing city hall. Not to mention what the local state Legislator is up to. I can’t do that in most places, because most places are no longer served by local media.
(OK, I’m lucky. My small city still has a locally owned newspaper laser focused on local reporting. But that is an exceptionally rare thing today.)
And it’s a shame that I can’t find out what is going on locally, because all of those local things will have a much larger impact on my life than the nationwide and worldwide happenings.
Stone Bryson has been writing about local elected sheriffs on his Substack recently.
Consider:
Who will have a greater impact on your quality of life…
Your local county sheriff?
or
The Secretary of Homeland Security?
It’s the local guy, almost every time.
Given that, it’s much more important that we know about the local sheriff than the Secretary in D.C. But, local reporting is expensive, and the market is limited, so it has almost completely disappeared from the marketplace.
And that’s bad for us as citizens.
How on earth do we know who is a crook, if there is no one there to report on the crookedness going on in the county courthouse? Indeed, without a reporter, we likely wouldn’t even know that a crime was taking place.
But not just for us as citizens. It’s bad for our public officials too.
One of my friends likes to say that iron sharpens iron. He’s right. Long ago I spent a few years as an elected official. After that, I spent a lot of years working for an elected official. Through all of those years, I encountered reporters and tough sometimes hostile questions. Know what? Those questions, even when they were tough, were good for me. They sharpened me. They made me stronger.
A free press is essential to a properly informed citizenry, and to a properly functioning government.
Similarly, a free press is essential to Freemasonry.
I’m just going to look at my Jurisdiction with this post, but I assume that many others are quite similar.
My Jurisdiction either never had an effective and engaging way of communicating with its Masons, or it did so long ago and let it wither away long before I was Made a Mason.
Either way, I guess it doesn’t matter. The fact is, when I became a Mason, there was no effective system of communication utilized by my Grand Jurisdiction.
We did have a magazine that was published a few times a year. No one read it. I know for a fact that no one read it, because when I was District Deputy the Grand Lodge decided that mailing it was too expensive, so asked all of us DDGM’s to distribute the copies in our districts. I’d take the copies to meetings, and no one would take them from me. I carried those unread things around for two years, finally tossing the old ones away when a new edition arrived.
In a nutshell, no one read the thing.
And it is easy to understand why no one read the thing.
Because if you held particular offices, you were expected to write articles for the magazine, and they were published as received.
But, here’s the thing. Writing is a specific skill. Most people aren’t into it. They have no interest in developing the skill, and they don’t want to write. So, my Jurisdiction would force people who didn’t want to write to write, and then wonder why no one wanted to read the result.
Eventually it was decided to stop printing magazines.
But, that was the only large scale communications system my Jurisdiction has seriously pursued during my time as a Mason.
Nothing effective or engaging has existed.
But, something needs to exist.
Someone needs to let the Brothers of the Jurisdiction know what initiatives their leaders are pursuing. Someone needs to get the word out about interesting Masonic happenings around the Jurisdiction. And someone needs to report when things are awry.
If we can’t do these things, we can’t really thrive.
Because how can a leader get buy in for his initiative if no one knows about it?
How can Lodges that decide to host interesting events get people to attend if there is no way for the word to get out about it?
How can the Craft at large know when something is going awry, so that they can pull together to fix it?
I don’t know the history, because I wasn’t a Mason, but I do imagine that communication was much better in my Jurisdiction long ago. I know for example that the Seattle area had a Masonic newspaper. I know that Lodges had printed trestle boards. I presume that there was much more in the distant past than there was when I became a Mason.
In my time, we had the magazine that no one bothered to read. Now we have a couple of email publications that don’t seem to reach very many Masons.
But, we were able to skate by.
We didn’t notice the devastating impact not having an effective and engaging communications system will have.
Because we had social media.
Specifically in my Jurisdiction, we had Facebook, and we utilized the heck out of it.
The Grand Lodge had a very active page that was always interesting. So did most of our Districts, most of our Lodges, and indeed, a great many individual Masons. Everyone out there, posting these important things where they would be seen and shared by Brothers everywhere in a very effective communications web.
We could get the word out, quickly, easily, effectively.
But the gravy train is over.
The reach of Masonic posts on Facebook has been collapsing in recent years, and the collapse is rapidly accelerating.
You don’t have to take my word for this.
If your Lodge has a long standing and long active Facebook page, just go back and look at the reach your posts had five or six years ago, and compare those numbers to today.
Bots and Ai generated content are only going to make this worse. If we think we are overwhelmed by fake masonic content now, just wait until scammers start creating it at scale with Ai.
My Jurisdiction, and I presume most if not all of our Jurisdictions, needs to figure out how we are going to communicate, as a Craft, when Social Media no longer does it for us. We have got to figure that out now.
If we don’t figure it out, and if we don’t start to build effective and engaging communications systems, we will find ourselves in a very bad place, and a lot sooner than we might imagine.
This is a fantastic piece, Cameron.
While I obviously cannot speak to Freemasonry specifically, my instincts tell me we are in a transitional phase when it comes to disseminating and consuming news. People are getting sick of (traditional?) social media, but are still not interested in returning to the (genuinely traditional) print outlets. As such, they are a bit in-limbo.
I think the answer is going to be in emailed newsletters, because they are convenient (everyone has at least one email address, after all) and people can get selective about whom they choose to trust. I also think they will be the answer to the dearth of locally-based news, and local journalists (and their fellow citizens) just need to catch up to that.
As such, while it may seem a little 'dry' right now, I think - with what you have here - you are not only in the prime position for the future, but to also successfully advise your fellow Freemasons... when they catch up with what you already know.
Humble opinion, of course :-)
While I am sure that your experience with "nobody reads them" is valid, I for one am part of that outlier I guess, as I do read them when published. When they were printed, I was always disappointed that I could never find a copy. When it started arriving digitally, I was happier, but still preferred the printed versions - if I ever found one. I don't know who had them, our secretary never advertised that he had copies, and if it was the district deputy, they never said anything either.
Edited to add: I was always disappointed that our district deputies in the area almost never contributed to the newsletter as well.
It's also the same with the printed GL team photo poster. I know they exist, but I never see them anywhere. You would think GL would at least send a copy out to the lodges, but I've only seen a couple in my eleven years of masonry. I don't even know if they still make them. I would assume those posters were meant to match names with faces and the lodge was supposed to post them in the tyler's area or something. Didn't ever see any except perhaps once.