September (Web-only) 2000

ARTICLE TOOLS

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Steve Wike, who has been Chief Operating Officer of Christian Internet site Crosswalk.com since his Goshen.net site was purchased by the company last August, resigned Monday. He will maintain his position on the company's board of directors. Last week was a tough one for Crosswalk, as its stock price fell to an all-time low: $1.438. It hasn't traded above $2 since mid-July. Yesterday, it turned to Christian radio company Salem Communications Corporation. Salem has had trouble attracting visitors to its streaming-audio-based site, OnePlace.com, and is now trying a new tactic with the announcement of its Salem Web Network, in which it will syndicate its radio programs (such as James Dobson's Focus on the Family, Chuck Swindoll's Insight for Living, and Charles Stanley's In Touch) to other Web sites. Crosswalk will apparently be the Salem Web Network's guinea pig.

Tom Beaudoin, the author of the acclaimed Virtual Faith: The Irreverent Spiritual Quest of Generation X, has an article in Business 2.0 about what will make religion work online. "The three premiere concerns of this century for the practice of faith online will be time, access, and commercialization," he says. His section on time is muddled, and actually has very little to do with temporal concepts. But he's fiery on commercialization: "As we build virtual sites of religious exploration online, we should not presume that the presence of advertising on those sites is an unambiguous good–or even a necessity. … If we say that it doesn't matter, that advertising is just the way of the world, we run the risk of treating our spiritual lives as just another product in our shopping ...