ISKCON News Goes 'Weekly'

As you may have noticed, ISKCON News is going weekly! Don’t worry, that doesn’t mean we’ll be providing you with any less news from the world of ISKCON… It just means you’ll be getting it all at once. No need to log on 3 or 4 times a week to see if there are any new stories – now you’ll know what to expect and when to expect it.

Just what exactly should you expect? Well, we managed to lure our editor Ekendra Dasa away from juggling phones and stacks of articles to tell you himself. (We had to use pizza – the guy’s a hard worker.) [ed. not true] “There’ll be a complete update every Saturday, with Prabhupada Memories videos, podcasts, recipes from top chef Kurma Dasa, Ravindra Svarupa Prabhu's new blog, Dravida's verse and of course around 15 – 20 brand new articles,” he said.

Many of these are written by ISKCON News Weekly’s own staff and are unique to our website. Our broader presentation, standard of journalism and credibility, and minimum use of internal concepts and terminology make our articles readable to both devotees and the general public. Some of them even have the potential to be printed in mass media – Vyenkata Bhatta’s piece on the movie The Love Guru, for instance, was also printed on mainstream website Beliefnet.com. (No, the movie is not a horrible affront on Hindu values that should be banned. Yes, it is kind of a flop.)

Ekendra explained further how we interface with the outside media. “We also print newspaper articles that are related to ISKCON or of interest to ISKCON members,” he said. “Our festivals and the way we interact with the public often elicit a lot of thought in people, resulting in plenty of articles in the secular press for us to draw from.”

ISKCON News Weekly has another important parallel with the mass media. “The media often plays the role of keeping abuse in check within a lot of organizations of power and influence in the world,” said Ekendra. “People could get away with a lot more if they were able to keep things quiet. ISKCON News Weekly plays a similar role, by writing about, for example, how the Kazakhstan government is unjustly persecuting devotees there.”

ISKCON News Weekly has always been about going more in depth with our stories and providing measured opinions. The new weekly format will allow us to do just that, freeing us from expectations of being the first people on the scoop.

It’s also simply the best format for the amount of news currently being communicated to us by the ISKCON community. Of course, we could be just scraping the tip of the iceberg. As Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati said, “Here in this world there are thousands of newspapers and magazines reporting the stale, repetitious happenings of this limited space. So for reporting the news of the unlimited spiritual realm, concerning the eternal, ever-fresh Supreme Personality of Godhead, we could publish a newspaper at every second, what to speak of daily.”

While we did try an “updated every second” edition of ISKCON News (We published six issues last Friday – you missed them), we’ve decided it doesn’t really work. “But we do encourage you to let us know what’s going on in your area,” said Ekendra. “And with your help, we will get more correspondents, and people will gradually become more aware of the service that we offer. Then, who knows? We could change to a daily format. But for now, weekly seems to suit us just fine.”

So if you want in-depth news about what’s going on in ISKCON today, balanced opinions on current issues, entertaining feature stories, recipes, video and audio, and, just maybe, a little bit of humor— remember to visit ISKCON News Weekly every Saturday at www.iskconnews.com