Bishops in Taiwan recently acknowledged the importance of communication skills by initiating a training workshop on dealing with the mass media.  The three-day workshop entitled “How to Deal with the Media” was conducted by the Jesuit work, Kuangchi Program Service (KPS), in January, at the invitation of Taiwan’s Chinese Regional Bishops Conference.

The 15 participants comprised the bishops and their diocesan representatives or spokespersons as well as the Secretary of the Conference.  The goal of the workshop, which was held at the new Bishops’ Conference building in Taipei, was to enable Taiwan’s bishops to make more effective use of the secular media and to provide them with essential skills and procedures to be used when crises arise in their dioceses. 

This workshop was similar to the workshop that KPS conducted for the Hualien Diocese in 2012, but this time the focus was primarily on the role of the Bishop.

Professor He Jyaju, a KPS Board Member and former news and public relations manager at China Television Service, provided the bishops with a detailed overview and analysis of the media environment in Taiwan, backed up by the most recent statistics and developments. 

Fr Jerry Martinson SJ provided some practical experience by conducting “ambush” interviews with individual bishops on sensitive and controversial topics, and then prepared interviews on their personal experiences as bishops. Methods of effectively relating stories and personal experiences were stressed in these sessions. Fr Jerry also introduced a resource,  “Managing Your Reputation — A Guide to Crisis Management for Church Communicators” written by Dr Jim McDonnell, which KPS had translated into Chinese.

The bishops and their assistants were also invited to take part in a simulated press conference and a TV panel discussion, conducted by Ms Xie Rongqian of Radio Veritas’ Mandarin Service and a former reporter for Taiwan’s China Central News.

The bishops were encouraged to follow the late Cardinal Paul Shan’s urging that such workshops be held regularly.  It was also proposed that bishops and other church leaders take advantage of professional organizations, such as Carnegie Training, which offer scholarships to Church personnel, in order to improve their communication and presentation skills.

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