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 you would imagine, I have to do a lot of writing about The Holidays — or the holy days? — this time of year. I try not to think about this as writing about Christmas, because most of what is going on really has nothing to do with Christmas.
In many ways, a Washington Post story this week titled “We let a wolf in” has the kind of remarkable layers and depth that you’d expect from a 4,300-word piece in that prominent newspaper’s Sunday magazine.
It is very hard to write about the history of Catholicism in the United States without writing about the city of Baltimore and the state of Maryland. Baltimore is, of course, the senior see in the United States and was established as a diocese on April 6, 1789.
Between the Wichita Eagle and The Des Moines Register, you would think that newspapers are doing just fine. Publish around 10,000 words on one story? No problem. Maybe editors think that people will flock to stories that make us weep around the holidays.
When we look at how the media writes about religion, we focus on news stories. But that’s only one of the ways the mainstream media discuss religion, of course. Even apart from the op-ed page — which we tend to stay away from unless there’s some breaking news there — there are photos, graphs, art reviews, advice columns and so on.
Between budget cuts, layoffs and diminishing page counts, it’s rare to see newspapers publish long-form stories of several thousand words or so. The Wichita Eagle puts its readers to the test by publishing a 3-part series of about 7,000 words. Its readers appeared to respond with hits, since the series “Promise Not to Tell” is the most-read story on the newspaper’s website this week.
When I saw the headline, I got nervous: “Obama, in shadow of worrisome polls, embraces ‘Christian’ label.”
You know how, in the competitions during the summer Olympics, the divers’ scores are often calculated on the basis of the difficult of the dives that they are attempting?
After our engagement, my husband suggested we put on a Google wedding: send out Google invitations through Gmail connected through Google Calendar, plan the wedding through Google Documents and then post wedding photos on Google’s Picasa and video on Google’s YouTube. I quickly nixed the idea, but I briefly wondered if we could’ve hired a Google pastor to perform the ceremony.
