Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Writing a provocative, timely, compelling profile is tough. How do you write a profile without becoming enamored with the successful book sales, the dynamic speeches or the captivated audiences? You want to describe and elaborate on why an individual is so successful or effective in his or her work, so it’s difficult to remain completely objective.
Anyone who has been paying attention knows that journalism is in a bit of a crisis right now, when it comes to keeping the public’s trust.
Someone posed this question to me last night: If Rick Perry is to the GOP as Howard Dean was to the Democrats in 2004, does that make Mitt Romney the eventual nominee from Massachusetts? And does that mean the incumbent will probably win?
I’ve tried to stay out of the whole Dominionism thing in recent weeks, in large part because if you have read a fair share of church history you — literally — have heard it all before. The partisans simply work up new labels in each new round of combat.
Journalists tend to love survey research since it often confirms or rejects their suspicions about trends they more casually observe. But reading through data and spotting the significant trends can get tedious, or–worse–journalists can misunderstand the data.
A couple of years ago there was a scandal involving the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Somehow, a decade’s worth of emails between scientists there were leaked to the world. The whole “hide the decline” scandal. Some of these emails suggested that scientists were going to take extreme measures to limit participation by anthropogenic global warming skeptics in academic discourse. Phil Jones, a climatologist there, sent an email that said, in part:
I’ve read a 3,500-word New York Magazine piece on King’s College’s new president at least three times, and each reading leaves me more confused.
What we have here is an example of a very serious religion-news story, one that is worthy of serious coverage in the mainstream press. A newspaper has covered it and that is good.
