Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
As “old media” seek to reach new audiences through the use of online technologies, we’ve seen journalists, like the Boston Globe’s Michael Paulson develop blogs (his is “Articles of Faith”). Sometimes these are a way of posting less formal comments on a topic. Sometimes they offer another place to discuss issues that journalists can’t fit into the traditional news hole.
Rather than update my previous Armenian genocide post with a link to Julia Duin’s article on its anniversary in the Washington Times, I wanted to highlight it separately. I noted that most stories about the events of 1915 were solely or almost exclusively political. Very few touched on religion in any meaningful way.
The details were numbingly horrible from the start: a 4 year old girl, the subject of a bitter custody battle, witnessed her father gunned down in front of her in a Queens, New York park. Both her parents were doctors and both were immigrants from Russia.
Today’s Times of London has a major story on a reconciliation program in Northern Ireland that has brought together Israeli soldiers and Palestinian militants, including a woman who had prepared to be a suicide bomber. Here is the beginning of the story:
Anyone who respects good religion coverage in the mainstream media has to shed a tear for the fast-disappearing City Section of the New York Times, which is down to eight pages today and will soon vanish both on paper and on line. The heart of the section, which circulates only in the New York area, are the Neighborhood Reports that cover events, people and places not normally covered in a big city newspaper.
If great religion journalism is going to survive, it is going to be because of the writing and not because of the pictures, graphics, videos or even blogs. That was driven home to me today when I read Andrew Rice’s masterful piece in the New York Times Magazine on the Redeemed Christian Church of God, one of the African missionary churches that the Times says is transforming Western Christianity.
My only complaint about religion coverage by Zev Chafets is that it does not appear far more often. Chafets is a former columnist for the New York Daily News (an archive of his columns is available at Jewish World Review) who now contributes frequently to The New York Times Magazine.
Passover, a time of family gatherings and a myriad of rituals, comes once every year. Birchat HaChama, the blessing of the sun, comes once every 28 years on the Jewish calendar. Owing to the journalistic principle that the rare story is often the better story, Birchat HaChama has been getting an inordinate amount of coverage this year. Both arrive on Wednesday and it looks like Birchat HaChama has already outshone Passover.
So the ever snarky team at the Washington Post Style section decides to do a feature story about male circumcision.
