Inspire, Spring 2004

Inspire 19 Often it seems that religious topics or verbage are hot buttons with the media today. It’s usually a love-hate relationship. The media either refuses to touch any story that has a religious theme, or it finds something interesting and devours it. Laurie Whaley ’97 learned how true that is when in the course of six months she was interviewed by more than 350 journalists around the world because of the Bible. Laurie works for Thomas Nelson Publishers (TNP), the ninth largest publisher in the world. She began working for TNP after completing her MBA at Tiffin University. About four years ago, TNP researched teens to learn how often they read the Bible. “The response,” Laurie said, “was that they don’t read the Bible because they find it to be too big, too freaky; it doesn’t make sense; they don’t know where to start; or they don’t know how it could possibly make sense for their lives today.” The next question to teens was, “What DO you read?” and the response was, “Magazines.” “From there,” Laurie said, “the idea for Revolve evolved. What if we could take the message of the Bible and preserve it, but put it in the format of what teens (and people in general) are most accustomed to reading – the magazine.” Revolve is the complete New Testament but looks like a fashion magazine for teenage girls written in the New Century Version. “If you’ve never been around the Bible, NCV makes sense because it’s in plain English,” Laurie explained. “If you’ve been around the Bible forever, the NCV is a fresh approach to passages, enabling you to hear something new. I say that the NCV is perfect for the ‘underchurched’ or the ‘overchurched.’” With its simple-to-read language and colorful layout, Revolve is a hit with teenage girls. Sprinkled between the 27 books of the New Testament, Revolve offers Q&A sections with biblical advice on numerous topics of interest to teens. It also has devotionals and profiles of biblical women, along with beauty secrets that have a spiritual emphasis. The magazine format hardly feels like a Bible and yet the message is the same. Soon after its release, Revolve became a media phenomenon. “In essence, the story was that the Bible had gotten a makeover, and the world’s largest, most respected Bible publisher had taken a leap of faith to reach teens,” explained Laurie. Laurie became a part of the Revolve picture in July 2002 when she began helping with art direction, testing with teens, and developing a review process with teen girls, moms, and youth pastors. “I also became heavily involved with the marketing plan,” she said. “Normally, we don’t do a publicity campaign with a Bible, but I was too ignorant to know this. So I thought we should hire a publicity firm and launch a national campaign to inform people of Revolve .” Her objective was to reach the general media instead of the trade periodicals or the Christian media, so she deliberately hired a public relations firm that wasn’t known for handling religious materials. That’s when she began interacting with the media and telling the Revolve story. “Literally, because no one else really wanted to talk to the media (I think they thought they’d never call!), I got pegged as the spokesperson for Revolve ,” she said. About five months into the campaign, the Detroit Free Press ran a story about Revolve which triggered stories by Focus on the Family, Newsweek, ABCnews.com, and several others. Soon Laurie was doing interviews with Fox News, the Religious News Wire, and Reuters. She recalled, “From there, things began to pour in! Within a few weeks, Revolve Us Again b y C e s s n a C a t h e r i n e W i n s l o w