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 covering foreign affairs (or even religion news), journalists often end up needing to mention the names of documents, institutions or groups — in the original language. Readers get used to seeing this.
Here we go again, with another post in our ongoing series about why mainstream journalists need to retire the word “devout” or, at the very least, be extremely careful when using this vague and almost meaningless adjective.
This is a strange one and I know that. I wasn’t sure that I was going to post a link to this story — “Who says religion is boring?” — until the link went live at Romenesko’s virtual water cooler and I started hearing from friends, colleagues and even a critic or two.
One of the hardest things that journalists have to do, from time to time, is cover controversial stories when they can only get voices on one side of the fight to talk on the record. Normally, one camp is seeking coverage and the other is trying to avoid it.
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.
I’ll admit right up front that my eyebrows arched way up when I saw that my local newspaper — that would be the Baltimore Sun — had published an A1 news feature on efforts by the Southern Baptist Convention to plant a circle of new churches in and around this unique urban environment that some call Charm City.
In the summer of 2006, Father Martyn Minns of Truro Episcopal Church outside Washington, D.C., became Bishop Martyn Minns of the Convocation for Anglicans in North America, a missionary effort of the gigantic Anglican Church of Nigeria. That would be three years ago.
It may be time for that old, old Episcopal joke, again. This is the version that I heard in the mid-1990s.
