Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
If there is anything that unites most professional journalists, it is a love affair with what most of us call the “killer quote.” This is not a quotation that literally kills someone, although I have seen a quotations that all but killed someone’s career.
Every now and then I stop and think to myself, “How in the heckfire did I do my job — make that my jobs, plural — before there was email and the World Wide Web?
Late last year I thought about blogging on a Q&A with Robert Novak in Washingtonian magazine. Now, with Novak’s death after a long battle with brain cancer, I’ve found that the reporter in that Q&A, Barbara Matusow, also deserves credit for recording one of the best quips about Novak. Matusow did this in a remarkable — and at times painfully candid — 5,000-word profile published in the June 2003 Washingtonian. She describes Novak’s baptism at St. Patrick Catholic Church in downtown Washington:
The Evangelical Lutheran Church of America is having it’s biennial convention this week and we’re seeing coverage about the most politically exciting topic that will be debated — homosexuality.
Some days, posting for GetReligion requires a great deal of work to explain some theological nuance that a reporter failed to understand. Other days, the work is downright easy. As is the case with pointing out the bias and problems in this hacktastic Associated Press piece on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
When a story’s headline is as ambitious as “Why Newt Gingrich Converted to Catholicism,” a reader might hope for a meaty report that addresses the question with insights from friends rather than with speculation. Amy Sullivan’s report for Time mostly does not deliver, except for a few good quotations from the convert himself and from his third wife, Callista.
As a reborn opinion journal, Newsweek has to keep up with cultural trends. A few weeks ago, it announced to its readers that polyamory, the practice of multiple relationships in which each partner is aware of the other ones, is going, if not mainstream, than at least tributary.
The big story of the day in the National Football League is Michael Vick and his shot at gridiron redemption with the Philadelphia Eagles.
Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic does a stellar job of profiling Quentin Tarantino, even while criticizing the darker impulses of his latest film, Inglourious Basterds.
