Here's a startling new reality for the 21st century: Anyone can be a journalist. It's never been easier to distribute facts and ideas far and wide. All the new and inexpensive technologies, such as the Web, computer publishing, and local community radio, provide almost anyone with a super-sized soapbox to express news and views, whether it's in the neighborhood, in Nigeria, or on the Net.

The question is, though, exactly what is news? And how should it be expressed?

Working journalists ask themselves those questions every day. The answers aren't always easy or always the same. Yet billions of people rely on journalists to provide them with "the news," which can then influence their jobs, their community and family, and their thinking.

More often than not, news consumers are unhappy with what they're being offered, despite high standards set by many in the profession. The news often seems too depressing, too distant, one-sided, incomplete, or just plain wrong.

That's why trying to be a journalist, even for a day, with all the ease of the new technologies, can open one's thinking to the profound responsibility and difficulty of digging up facts and ideas about the world and distributing them to others.

But more than that, just knowing how a journalist thinks can help a person better pick and choose what news items to read or watch. That daily discernment by many people can greatly influence the direction of the news business.

Examples of individuals jumping into journalism and then radically changing it are rare or fleeting. Yet one person, Mary Baker Eddy, did just that nearly 100 years ago. Her publication, The Christian Science Monitor, is still making a difference in the profession and in people's lives today.

At that time, in 1908, she had already founded a spiritual movement that, through her book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, had revived the healing practice taught by Jesus.

As a further expression of her love for humanity, she wanted a newspaper that offered a wholly fresh way to look at world events. She defied limited expectations about her gender. She didn't accept the constraints of time and money. And most of all, she refuted the established norms of the "yellow journalism" of her day in order to start the Monitor.

Why does this newspaper still continue to make such a difference? Is it because it's upbeat and foresighted? Fair, objective, and global? Is it because it has won six Pulitzers and many other awards?

No. Rather the paper's radical approach is that it operates from a recognition of man's present perfection as a reflection of God, and the possibility of seeing this made manifest in human experience. Its reporters are assigned to go below the surface of events and see the constant unfolding of God's eternal qualities—such as justice, mercy, and harmony—expressed in human affairs.

"The great spiritual fact must be brought out that man is, not shall be, perfect and immortal," Science and Health states. "The evidence of man's immortality will become more apparent, as material beliefs are given up and the immortal facts of being are admitted" (p. 428).

In my years as a Monitor writer, I've challenged myself to apply such truths to my work. When covering a story that seems grim, such as a military coup in Manila or a hostage-taking in the United States, my approach has been to see the "facts" through the lens of spiritual perfection.

That often just means reversing the prevalent thinking about someone or something to see them in a new light. This type of reporting is in accord with Jesus' instruction: "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect" (Matt. 5:48).

Mrs. Eddy wanted the Monitor "to injure no man, but to bless all mankind" (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 353). In practical terms, that means avoiding personal attacks. The Monitor treats its readers as able to make up their own minds on the news. It assumes readers are ready to bring their best thinking to the problems of the world. Mrs. Eddy wanted the paper to be a "genial persuader" (L14824, William R. Rathvon to William P. McKenzie, January 4, 1910. [Rathvon, a member of Mary Baker Eddy's secretarial staff, is quoting McKenzie's own reference to the Monitor.] Courtesy of The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and The Mary Baker Eddy Library for the Betterment of Humanity).

Recently, I found a Monitor stylebook from 1951, with these words of advice to the staff: "Try to visualize, as you sit at the typewriter [or PC], the impact of your words on all kinds of readers—including the person about whom you are writing—and write fairly as well as fearlessly."

That quality, of loving the reader as much as the news, is just one of many qualities that can be expressed by any journalist.

As more and more people discover the new technologies that allow them to reach others with information, those qualities—qualities that derive from the perfection of man as God's image—can be a constant source of inspiration.