I love following Michael Paulson’s Articles of Faith blog but one of his posts last week depressed me. He was explaining that he was at the Religion Newswriters Association 60th annual convention where travel budgets and downsizing of the religion beat meant decreased attendance. He said that when he first started covering religion for the Boston Globe nearly 10 years ago, the beat was almost trendy:
No more. Just this week, as I was preparing to depart for Minnesota, my colleague Gary Stern, who has been a model of how to successfully juggle religion writing for a newspaper and a blog simultaneously, announced that his employer, the Journal News (of Westchester County, New York) had decided it was no longer going to have a full-time religion writer. Gary is fortunate — he gets to keep a job — and he says he’s going to try to continue posting periodically about religion — but clearly the beat is diminished there. This comes on the heels of a decision by the San Francisco Chronicle to stop covering religion full-time — Matthai Kuruvila is now covering the East Bay — and, most shockingly, the decision by the Dallas Morning News, which for years had an award-winning religion section, to kill the free-standing section and reassign the writers to suburban education and other beats.
There have been reductions in the number of reporters who write about religion full-time at all of the nation’s biggest newspapers —- the New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times (and even at the Globe, where for a brief period we had two religion writers) — and the religion news beat has disappeared from the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Orlando Sentinel, the Palm Beach Post, the Grand Rapids Press, the Chicago Sun-Times, the San Diego Union-Tribune, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and Newsday, according to Debra Mason, the executive director of the Religion Newswriters Association. The surviving newspaper religion sections are getting smaller. And at many small and mid-sized newspapers, reporters now juggle coverage of religion with other, often unrelated, subjects, and religion often gets short shrift.
It’s not, the post goes on to say, that the religion beat is being particularly targeted. It’s just that the journalism industry is in the tank. On the other hand, while the number of newspaper employees who are members of RNA has decreased, the number of freelancers has increased. And there are other signs of health, too. Paulson goes on to analyze what this all means but I just want to pause on the news about Stern.
Stern is a great local religion reporter. He’s won a ton of awards. He does a great job covering stories big and small on his beat. Here’s a recent post looking at how local Muslims are marking Ramadan. He’s one of those reporters that does such a good job that it almost keeps him from getting mentioned here at all. But that doesn’t mean that he’s not a treasure. I’m glad he’ll keep covering religion in a limited capacity but I’m really sad that he won’t be on the beat full time.
In his post explaining the change, Stern writes:
Clearly, I think religion news is important in many ways—and that the beat is perhaps the most interesting in journalism. I’ve written about this many times.
But these are tough times for everyone and the newspaper industry is going through a brutal transition period. No one knows what the news media might look like, say, a decade from now.
It will be interesting to watch this change in print media and it will be interesting to see if and how that changes our role here at GetReligion. In the meantime, our best wishes to Stern and all of the other veteran Godbeat scribes who are adjusting to the new landscape.
 | Posted at 2:11 pm |  Print
| Permalink | Trackback |
Comments (11) |
September 13, 2009, at 2:25 pm
The Cleveland Plain Dealer no longer has a religion section but it does cover major church stories such as the downsizing of the Cleveland Catholic diocese; and one sports reporter, the well-regarded Terry Pluto, publishes a regular faith column.
September 14, 2009, at 1:04 am
I have to agree with one respondent. When the only religious coverage a person gets from reading the Religion section is negative stories, why should a religious person care that there are no more religious sections? The rest of the information can be placed in the lifestyles or community section.
September 14, 2009, at 1:09 am
In times of economic crisis, the things that get cut are the things that produce the worst marginal return on investment. And so it makes me wonder about the readership demographics of newspapers. Is reporting on religion a poor investment for media outlets? Does the readership demand such coverage?
I stopped subscribing to the local newspaper about 15 years ago. And I did so for one simple reason - I was tired of paying a newspaper to insult my religious faith. One day you open the paper, and you see the obligatory weekly article attacking the doctrines of the Christian faith, and you say “That’s it.” I haven’t subscribed to a paper since that day. It was a radical departure for me, in that up until that time I had always subscribed.
I can’t be the only one. So I wonder if there is a push-pull phenomenon at work. As newspapers become more secular in their outlook, do they tend to drive away more religious readers? Has newspaper readership has come to resemble more closely the readership of the NY Times. Secular. Upscale. Cosmopolitan. If so, it would not surprise me that religious reporting would get cut in a down economy. The market would only demand reporting on religious scandal, and falsification of religious doctrine. Because that is pretty much the only interest secular, upscale, cosmopolitan readers have in religious reporting.
carl
September 14, 2009, at 10:00 am
carl, in your zeal to expose stereotyping on the part of newspapers you’ve created and brandished a stereotype of your own: Secular, upscale and cosmopolitan. I recall a line from Jesus about motes and beams.
September 14, 2009, at 12:32 pm
Not so fast there, Dave. Carl’s on to something. As more and more “news” gets slanted, more properly belonging in the OpEd pages, when the press becomes more and more of a shill for the DNC, people are opting out. Subscriptions fall, advertising goes south, and cuts have to be made. ALL repoting suffers, not just religious.
Latest Pew Research figures (check the Drudge report for today)show public opinion/confidence in news outlets has fallen dramatically in the last 20+ years.
Accuracy: 1985 55% 2009 29%
Fair to both sides: 1985 34% 2009 18%
71% get their national/international news from TV; only 33% from newspapers.
Check out the Pew Report. There’s more than what I’ve noted here. It’s illuminating.
September 14, 2009, at 1:07 pm
Ed, I’m not arguing with carl’s slippery-slope analysis of how cuts in religious (and other) reporting lead to worse journalism, which leads to more cutting, etc. I’m pointing out the use of a stereotype to reinforce his point. If the point holds up on its own the stereotype is unnecessary.
September 14, 2009, at 1:43 pm
Dave
It is a stereotype to suggest that the readership of the NY Times is upscale, urban, and cosmopolitan in outlook? How should I describe it then? Diverse? Inclusive? Accepting?
I was suggesting that ideological bias in a media outlet will over time tend to homogenize its audience according to presupposition. Readership will therefore tend to track the worldview of the journalists who produce the copy. If that is true, then it makes sense to me that religious reporting would be vulnerable. Journalists are overwhelmingly secular. They do not value religion for its own sake, and tend to see it as fundamentally antithetical to modernity. A readership aligned with this outlook will therefore not value religious reporting - except for those stories that confirm their governing presuppositions. They will not demand religious reporting, and the purveyors or journalism will respond to the market.
carl
September 14, 2009, at 5:02 pm
carl, you make a more persuasive case for your slippery-slope theory when you leave out the stereotype of readers.
However, you have replaced it with a stereotype of a reporter: secular, dismissive of religion, modernist. I’m sure if you get rid of it and don’t replace it with another, you’ll make the argument even more persuasive.
September 16, 2009, at 10:06 am
When does a stereotype become a truth? I think when it comes to reporters and newspapers this is the case.
September 16, 2009, at 11:11 am
Jettboy, a stereotype often has a grain of truth. A particular human cohort may have a particular trait more often than average. That’s a correlation. It becomes a stereotype when the whole cohort is described that way, and it becomes a one-dimensional defintion of the cohort.
The media, both mainstream and marginal, can become purveyors of stereotype when they lack either the time or the inclination to give a more nuanced description.
September 19, 2009, at 1:54 pm
[…] veteran religion-reporter Gary Stern blogged about his paper eliminating the religion beat, and Mollie at Get Religion wondered how these shake-ups will change the way that blog analyzes religion reporting. But what does this […]