As far as I know, veteran Godbeat and popular culture scribe Mark Pinsky isn’t dead (although I haven’t heard from him in a week or two, so I will check). His website is nice and up-to-date looking.
Still, it is clear shock waves from the news that Pinsky was part of newsroom cutbacks at the Orlando Sentinel continue to affect the mood of many people who care about religion-news coverage in the mainstream press.
In fact, another Florida-based scribe — Cary McMullen (his blog is here) of The Ledger — pounded out an obituary for the entire world of religion news, in part inspired by the Pinsky announcement. This obit opens with a love song to the Religion Newswriters Association and the pros who form that august crowd. Then McMullen leaps in gloomy territory, which no doubt inspired the feature’s “Religion News Becoming Obsolete” headline:
To some extent, I still have not lost my sense of awe for my colleagues, even though the names and faces that once were familiar to me have changed. In recent years, it seems that the faces are changing more quickly. Or rather, they’re disappearing.
As you would expect, the details about Pinsky’s departure are depressing, to those who care about mainstream news. But here’s the part that we need to think about:
In a sense, it’s the logical outcome of the reduction in newspaper size and sections. Those papers that had religion sections — the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the Dallas Morning News, etc. — began to eliminate them, and in some cases their reporters were reassigned. Now, it’s the reporters being eliminated, meaning that a specialized knowledge is being lost, and with it the ability of papers to make sense, on a local basis, of an intricate subject. I often tell people that being a religion reporter is a little like being a sports reporter who has to know the rules and the key players of sports as different as soccer, polo, baseball and fencing.
The problem, of course, is that there is more religion news out there than ever, not less, and the beat is getting more complex, not less.
On one level, we have to see this religion-beat crisis as a reflection of what is happening in the news industry. There is no painless way to cut a shrinking pie. Yet, of course, the news pie is not shrinking. It’s changing into forms that do not include solid, workable forms of advertising. A key element of American public life and discourse is hanging, twisting slowly in the wind, waiting for someone to create an ad form more winsome than those pop-up mini-monsters that we all hate so much.
However, do not click “comment” and tell me that you get all the news you need from the Internet and from blogs.
It takes real money to pay people to report and edit real information. Most of what happens in weblogs — like this one, frankly — is secondary writing and criticism. We are all like those little fish stuck on the flanks of big sharks. Someone has to fund the shark, which does the real hunting.
At the same time, we are also seeing another vivid illustration of how editors and newspaper managers think and how they view the world around them. Hint: Many of them do not get religion. This is a topic I have written about over and over for a quarter of a century (Quill ‘83 here, Quill ‘93 here, Poynter.org ‘03 is here).
It also helps to remember that the World Wide Web is a buffet of niche news topics, teaming with readers who are very interested in specific, detail-rich subjects that, for them, may as well be matters of life and death and eternal life. Religion is the kind of topic that should thrive on the Net and it does. Kind of. The problem — a Catch-22, again — is that supporting this kind of specialty reporting requires resources.
Yes, there are non-profit sources of some religion news. But do you trust denominational wire services to bring you the news about their own pews? Yes, those wire services are crucial and do tons of fine work. But are they enough? Do you trust Planned Parenthood to cover Planned Parenthood or Focus on the Family to cover Focus on the Family? And so forth and so on.
End of sermon. I believe we are moving into an era in which wire services and national newspapers will play major roles, backed, I hope, by high-quality websites for smaller, niche audiences. I certainly am not prepared to schedule a funeral Mass for the religion beat or for religion news. I would not be doing the jobs that I do, if I felt that way.
Also, please be alerted — yet again — to a new book that is coming out later this year from Oxford University Press, entitled “Blind Spot: When Journalists Don’t Get Religion.” My chapter in the book is based on interviews with pros and scholars who have found ways to improve work on this beat. In other words, my chapter is part of this equation — How To Get It Right.
Here’s what Prof. Ari Goldman of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York City — formerly a religion-beat specialist at The New York Times — had to say about the book. He’s the author of the classic “The Search for God at Harvard.”
It’s not often that I get up and do a dance of joy when I read a book, but I did while reading “Blind Spot: When Journalists Don’t Get Religion.” I’ve been preaching this gospel for 15 years and it’s great to see it so brilliantly argued and supported in these pages. The editors have done an impressive job in assembling a top-flight team of writers to build the case brick by solid brick. It is now an unassailable truth: without an understanding of religion, a journalist can miss the greatest stories of our time.
So help us get the word out.
Meanwhile, consider this post an open thread on the state of religion writing in the mainstream. But honestly, folks, look at the larger picture. Look for the signs of progress, as well as the signs of trouble. Your GetReligionistas see excellent work out there every day, as well as the ghosts and gaffes.
UPDATE: Heard from Pinsky and he’s doing fine. You may have seen him on CNN the other day (or perhaps Dutch public television). He’s working on a nonfiction book about a murder in North Carolina and pounding out a few freelance pieces hither and yon. Look for a big piece in the bulletin of the Harvard Divinity School on science and religion.
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Comments (12) |
August 27, 2008, at 4:04 pm
I’m glad my blog hunting came to good use.
August 27, 2008, at 4:55 pm
This is, of course, witnessed by the traffic here.
One day, without fanfare but with a few moist eyes, the mainstream media finally died and was buried. There was a wonderful eulogy about the great accomplishments and wonderful legacy of the MSM. And people wondered aloud what will take its place, at least for the best parts of the MSM. Even bloggers mourned not having the MSM to kick around any longer. Now they would have no choice but to go after each other with renewed zeal knowing that the only enemy left was themselves.
August 28, 2008, at 1:01 am
When dinosaurs ruled the earth and I was young, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram Saturday edition had a large prominent religion section. It was the second section: when you pulled away the front page section, you saw RELIGION across the top of what is now the local and Texas news. I don’t remember how the old Fort Worth Press handled religion. When I came back here in 1990, the Press was gone, as was the S-T religion section. At some point they turned the back two pages of the Sunday “Opinion” section over to religion. I had some fun indulging epistemological speculations on the relatedness of “opinion” and “belief”, but there was a decent amount of information there. Well, that went away and the “Faith and Spirit” feature is buried in what has been known at various times as the “Life”, “Lifestyle”, or “Women’s News” (speaking of dinosaurs) section. It’s usually some bland wire service feature, with local church ads and community service announcements of religious events. I wouldn’t swear it’s even there every week. Jim Jones, a liberal Baptist, was the religion writer for years, but I haven’t seen his byline lately and he seems to be gone from their website.
Maybe it’s good that there isn’t a “religion” section anymore. Maybe it means religion is integrated into overall coverage, as it is in life. But I don’t think so. I think it’s just less of a part of our public life and the newspaper reflects that. For good or ill, we as a culture have done a fair job of pushing religion into the place of a private hobby. Whether that’s a good or bad thing isn’t germane here; the point is that the news media reflects it. A legitimate question is whether the news media promotes it. Another fair question is how real the privatization of religion is, and thus, how out of touch journalism might be with how people really live wrt their faith.
Which leads to the whole question of the internet and the downsizing of traditional news sources. The Star-Telegram has recently gone through a major layoff, as, I believe, has the Dallas Morning News. Is this a bad thing? Is it a bad thing when I can get information unmediated by a reporter, an editor, and a publisher? I can sure get manipulated on the internet, but perhaps the journalistic profession will get the message that many of us consider traditional media too often manipulative. And out of touch with how a lot of people actually live.
Newspapers have been a shrinking factor in reporting of the news for, what, 80 years (?), as movies, radio, and TV all became ready sources of news. And now the internet is having it’s effect. Personally, I think it’s a good thing. I’ve been through layoffs and am sympathetic to the personal problems people are experiencing. However, I think we will be better off as a culture as more varied, and less processed news becomes available. My iGoogle news page has 9 news sources on it right now, including Fox and CNN, the BBC, Reuters, and some more. I read a variety of blogs, so I get a lot of opinion and analysis. I don’t depend on the Star-Telegram anymore.
August 28, 2008, at 8:06 am
Close, but not quite. Most newspapers recognize that:
* There aren’t enough readers to justify covering polo, fencing, and other unpopular sports, so newspapers focus their energy on popular sports
* Sports fans are savvy enough to spot a reporter who doesn’t understand a sport, so newspapers have “specialists” for each popular sports
In other words, newspapers get sports fans and therefore, for the most part, get sports. What I don’t understand is why those same newspapers don’t get religion. It’s like a willful ignorance that translates into terrible business decisions.
August 28, 2008, at 11:20 am
Yes, I’m still alive, breathing and above ground. When I read thess smug, wishful obituaries for the MSM (see above), I am reminded of that line from “A Man for All Seasons,” about when you have cut down all the trees/laws. The point has been made before, but without the MSM what will these genius bloggers have to write about? In the market economy, a product is worth what people will pay for it. Now you pat the bunny. Mark Pinsky
August 28, 2008, at 12:02 pm
[…] Terry Mattingly of GetReligion.org has an interesting blog post headlined: RIP: The religion beat? Worth checking it out. […]
August 28, 2008, at 1:56 pm
I’ve definitely felt at times that we journalists can be a bit self-righteous about the role we play in a democratic society. But there is no self-preservation at work when religion journalists, myself included, complain about the demise of this most important of specialty beats. What influences our world more than our beliefs about God, our responsibility to him and the world hereafter?
August 28, 2008, at 3:57 pm
My problem is that invariably, when reporters decide to ‘get religion’, they mainly get Christian religion, as if nothing from American Jews or Hindus or Buddhists or Sikhs is important to the discourse. As I see it, Conservative Christians have hijacked religious discourse for the past several decades, and since they are the noisier group, they often get the most attention. But do they represent the average Christian or the average American? Hard to tell.
And what about so-called non-believers? (That’s a misnomer, since they absolutely DO believe in something.) I’d love to hear from some humanists in a way that doesn’t demonise them. I mean, ethics is a very important part of religion and it’s an important part of humanism too. Perhaps religion writers feel that humanism isn’t a religion.
August 28, 2008, at 4:28 pm
You betcha! The treatment of Humanists by the Cleveland Plain Dealer when I was one, was my initiation into “get religion.” The PeeDee quoted some Religious Reich bloviator about how “secular humanism” had brought about such a dismal world and never checked with any Humanists for their POV. I phoned in a complaint and was told I could write a letter to the editor. This was a long time ago; I became a Pagan in 1987.
August 29, 2008, at 10:08 am
Thanks, Terry, for adding your comments to mine. I loved your analogy about the shark and the pilot fish. As you say, someone has to feed the shark. Since I wrote that column, there was another round of layoffs here at The Ledger. I’m fine, and I’ll continue to cover religion, but another beat has been added to my plate. And, the reporters here have been told we should expect we could be asked to cover any story at any time. This paper has been good to me, so I’m trying to look at it as my bit to help it survive.
September 18, 2008, at 6:11 pm
[…] GetReligion, a web site that critiques religion coverage, weighed in on the state of the beat last month, in an item headlined, “RIP: The religion beat?” An excerpt from the post, by Terry Mattingly: “The problem, of course, is that there is more religion news out there than ever, not less, and the beat is getting more complex, not less. On one level, we have to see this religion-beat crisis as a reflection of what is happening in the news industry. There is no painless way to cut a shrinking pie. Yet, of course, the news pie is not shrinking. It?s changing into forms that do not include solid, workable forms of advertising. A key element of American public life and discourse is hanging, twisting slowly in the wind, waiting for someone to create an ad form more winsome than those pop-up mini-monsters that we all hate so much. However, do not click ?comment? and tell me that you get all the news you need from the Internet and from blogs. It takes real money to pay people to report and edit real information. Most of what happens in weblogs ? like this one, frankly ? is secondary writing and criticism. We are all like those little fish stuck on the flanks of big sharks. Someone has to fund the shark, which does the real hunting.” […]
September 22, 2008, at 3:01 pm
[…] GetReligion, a web site that critiques religion coverage, weighed in on the state of the beat last month, in an item headlined, “RIP: The religion beat?” An excerpt from the post, by Terry Mattingly: “The problem, of course, is that there is more religion news out there than ever, not less, and the beat is getting more complex, not less. On one level, we have to see this religion-beat crisis as a reflection of what is happening in the news industry. There is no painless way to cut a shrinking pie. Yet, of course, the news pie is not shrinking. It’s changing into forms that do not include solid, workable forms of advertising. A key element of American public life and discourse is hanging, twisting slowly in the wind, waiting for someone to create an ad form more winsome than those pop-up mini-monsters that we all hate so much. However, do not click “comment†and tell me that you get all the news you need from the Internet and from blogs. It takes real money to pay people to report and edit real information. Most of what happens in weblogs — like this one, frankly — is secondary writing and criticism. We are all like those little fish stuck on the flanks of big sharks. Someone has to fund the shark, which does the real hunting.” […]