May I have a brief moment, please, to ask a question to my fellow religion-beat reporters?
I have a style question for you folks. Has the ever-evolving Associated Press stylebook addressed the issue of whether the news beat on which we work is also called the “God beat,” the “Godbeat,” the “godbeat” or maybe the “gods beat”?
Just asking. I asking that question because many GetReligion readers may have seen the Religion News Service piece by Bob Smietana that ran with this double-decker headline:
After 20 years, Terry Mattingly bids farewell to GetReligion
Religion reporting still matters, Mattingly says, but the internet’s ‘preaching to the choir’ algorithms have won out
In that news piece for mainstream newspapers, Smietana went with “ ‘God beat’ specialists” when describing religion-beat professionals. That’s interesting, since I have always seen “Godbeat” as the official nickname (at least for old-timers like me).
I should stress that Smietana and I talked for 90 minutes for this piece, after quite a few long conversations over the years. It’s a remarkably kind piece, although I really wished some other GetReligionistas had been quoted.
I was glad that Smietana did this story. Last year, the media-ethics pro Aly Colon of Washington and Lee University asked me to nominate some speakers for a pair of Poynter seminars for journalists who, while they don’t work on the religion beat, their work frequently veers into religion territory. Smietana was one of the first reporters I mentioned, stressing that “while Bob and I have argued about lots of things for many years” he is a “pro’s pro on the beat who knows his stuff and he needs to be there.”
In this RNS feature, Smietana wrote:
A proud curmudgeon, Mattingly is known for his outspoken opinions and blunt criticism, as well as his loyalty and willingness to make friends with people he disagrees with.
“I don’t write people off. I don’t want them to write me off,” said Mattingly in a recent interview from his home in the mountains of Tennessee.
He also noted that for the “last 20 years, Mattingly has been best known as editor of GetReligion.org.” Well, that may be true among journalists and people on the platform previously known as Twitter, but I would argue that there are more readers of the “On Religion” column, which goes out to several hundred news publications of various forms.
However, I understand that this was a complicated reference and hard to handle in a concise manner. I’ve been writing that weekly column for 35 years and it began with the Scripps Howard News Service (#RIP), before switching (after 25 years) to what many still call the Universal syndicate. The name, these days, is Andrews McMeel Universal after a few years as Universal Uclick. Like I said — it’s complicated.
However, there are two important subjects that I wanted to thank Smietana for dwelling on in this feature. The first is the roots of the whole “blogging” phenomenon and the start of GetReligion. Here is a chunk of that (although I’d like to note that my friend and colleague LeBlanc spent some time in mainstream religion-beat work before moving into Anglican news platforms):
When he first launched GetReligion in 2004, with the help of Christian journalist Doug LeBlanc, Mattingly said there was no long-term plan. Instead, he was intrigued by the idea of blogging, which then was beginning its heyday. He was inspired by Andrew Sullivan, a former senior editor of The Atlantic whose “Daily Dish” made him one of the so-called blogosphere’s first stars.
“The whole idea that you go online with no set word length, and this was key — have hyperlinks to stories — convinced me that this could be done. I knew it would always be controversial, and it would make people mad. But I always wanted people to be able to just click a link and go read the story for themselves.”
The site’s name was inspired by a comment from former New York Times editor Abe Rosenthal, who once complained that journalists don’t “get” religion, which caused them to miss important stories. That comment, said Mattingly, reminded him of the southern phrase about “getting religion.”
“We wanted people to realize that if you don’t spot religion, you miss stories,” he said.
Rosenthal was certainly an inspiration, but I would note that he was talking — in that quote — about the failure of journalists to “get” the importance of a specific story, as in the rising pool of blood surrounding the persecution of religious minorities around the world. I had also heard Bill Moyers of CBS News use a similar wording years earlier. Also, I connected that, in my mind, with the feminist mantra “they just don’t get it.”
Again, complex stuff. Readers interested in the roots of blogging may want to blast through the two YouTube clips embedded in this post, taken from my remarks during a “Boggled by Blogging” panel at the 2008 Religion News Association conference in Washington, D.C. — only four years after the birth of GetReligion.org.
Let’s face it: Religion is dangerous territory for online work. I noted, for example, what Steven Waldman once told me was the informal Beliefnet rule for hot comments on posts. In the D.C. panel, I described that as:
“In a comment … you are allowed to say, ‘My faith teaches that, because of what you believe, you are going to hell.’ You are not allowed to say, ‘My faith teaches that what you believe means that you are going to hell and I would like to assist in that process as quickly as possible.’ “
At that event, I stressed that we hoped that GetReligion.org would be seen as what I called a “law-firm blog,” with a panel of qualified scribes writing in an informative manner about an important topic, as opposed to a “first-person obsessive” blog fueled by one writer offering a tsunami of personal opinion.
I also said that our goal here was to: “Praise the good, edit the bad and spot what we call the ‘ghosts,’ which are subjects that are haunted by religion” but journalists may have missed that fact.
This big, complex subject was addressed by two very important parts of the Smietana piece, and, again, I thank him for that:
GetReligion was known for its hard-edged criticism of religion news stories, especially those written by reporters who didn’t specialize in covering religion. Mattingly said he tried to avoid criticizing reporters by name when finding what he thought was an error in a story — as he never knew whether the reporter or an editor was to blame.
“We know we can’t call them up and ask, ‘What happened?’” he said. “Because they can’t tell us. We have no idea who actually approved that error — I mean, every reporter knows what it’s like to have someone edit an error into your story.”
He recalled writing a story for the Rocky Mountain News about the secrecy surrounding rituals in the temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — and having an error inserted in the editing process. The next day, Mattingly said, a wise city editor sent him out of town to write a story about chaplains at ski resorts while newsroom leaders figured out how to address the error.
“The switchboard at the paper melted down,” he said.
Also, there was this very crisp byte of background material (crunching down lots of this):
GetReligion was launched to do three things: promote religion coverage, especially stories from “God beat” specialists; to look for “religion ghosts” — stories where the role of religion has been overlooked; and to defend what Mattingly calls “the American Model of the Press,” driven by fairness and objectivity rather than by preaching to the choir.
OK, one final comment, which some might consider a “quibble.” I didn’t create the “American Model of the Press” term — that was something I encountered long ago in graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and have used that information for years in classes linked to journalism history.
That’s a very important subject and, trust me, I don’t deserve credit for creating that term. But I will ask: Is there a better name for the model of journalism that began to emerge in the late 19th Century, as improved printing presses made it possible to distribute larger numbers of newspapers to broader audiences (as opposed to niche groups in a community)?
Just asking. But, again, many thanks to Smietana for this long and detailed feature. I am sure that our paths will continue to cross and that arguments will continue (I hope).