Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Believe it or not, your GetReligionistas are busy people who do have lives and other jobs. You can tell this from time to time when typos slip into print and we are slow to fix them. You can tell when huge stories break and it takes us a day or so to get our act together and wade through oceans of digital ink in search of a ghost or two. Is that a mixed metaphor, or what?
When it comes to same-sex couples living together, with (or without) sex, New England has a reputation for being just a little bit more innovative than the rest of the country. Not for nothing was such an arrangement in the 19th century termed a “Boston marriage.”
Our friends at Episcopal Café may be about the only media people to place Walter Cronkite’s faith so high in a story, but there it is, right in the headline: “Walter Cronkite, newsanchor & Episcopalian, dies at 92.”
Any longtime reader of GetReligion knows that the gang here likes Q&A interviews, especially when they allow newsmakers to dig deeper into complex topics and tell their own stories in their own words. I think this journalistic tool is especially valuable on the religion beat — which is so rich in history, symbolism and doctrine.
You know, it really isn’t hard to get the Anglican-wars timeline right or to, at least, craft one or two short, editor-friendly sentences that do not mangle the facts. There’s no need to warp time in this story.
The Associated Press report is very, very, very short and raises many more questions than it answers. Here is a typical version (or click here for a longer version in the Los Angeles Times):
The Rev. Brad Braxton’s trials at Manhattan’s famed Riverside Church have been much reported since a few members of the congregation unsuccessfully sued their new pastor in April for receiving a pay and compensation package that exceeded $600,000 annually.
One of concepts that causes my journalism students the most grief is finding the line between making statements of personal opinion and making statements that draw logical conclusions from facts that have been stated on the record or verified in a document. It’s the line between editorial writing and news, when you get right down to it.
