Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
I love writing about religion and economics, but my true passion is baseball. If I could combine writing about baseball with writing about religion or economics, that would be the best.
Some people look at Newsweek‘s precipitous decline as an example of how to destroy a magazine. (Its most recent issue had six ads.) Other people apparently want to emulate it. Or so I’m led to believe by TIME magazine’s decision to have former Newsweek editor Jon Meacham write its cover story celebrating Rob Bell and his views on hell.
So I am sure that GetReligion readers will be shocked, shocked to know that gay-rights conflicts continue in the great state of California and that a hot new conflict on the horizon is linked to a giant project in public schools.
Sadly, it isn’t unusual to open up a copy of The Baltimore Sun and find a story about clergy sexual abuse. Our town isn’t that far from Philadelphia, after all.
Occasionally a piece sits for a week or two before one of us realizes it needs to be addressed. Straight from that guilt file folder, we have a New York Times front-page article on pastors who struggle to find jobs because they are single.
In this day of tight budgets and a shrinking supply of space in major newspapers, it says something when the editors of the Washington Post devote a giant chunk of A1 turf to a story about a church controversy. This was certainly the case with the recent story that ran under the headline, “Vienna Presbyterian Church seeks forgiveness, redemption in wake of abuse scandal.”
What makes a story newsworthy? Impact, relevance and timeliness are at the top of the list. But editors also love novelty.
The Newspaper That Lands In My Yard had an interesting story the other day that focused on what may be a new wrinkle in the ongoing sexual-abuse scandals that have rocked the clergy of the Catholic Church for three decades.
I’ve been fascinated by the Rob Bell no-one-goes-to-hell controversy, and I was particularly captured by this lede from the Associated Press:
