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I just received an email from the Rev. Dr. Arne H. Fjeldstad of Norway, the Lutheran pastor and veteran newspaper editor who is the director of the Oxford Centre for Religion and Public Life, which is the organization that brings you GetReligion (be patient, that website is just getting started).
A long, long time ago, I remember a comment that a city-desk editor made when reporters started using the really early laptop computers (photo) to cover live news events. Everyone was excited because this was going to streamline the shipping of stories back to the newsroom, making it possible for reporters to write closer to deadline on breaking stories.
There is, sad to say, mounting evidence that GetReligion readers are not all that interested in discussing the changes in the religion-news coverage strategies of The Dallas Morning News. This is rather disappointing to me because the “multi-platform” news questions faced by Jeffrey Weiss & Co. are issues that the entire news world will have to face sooner rather than later.
If you have been looking for the religion section of The Dallas Morning News under the Features tab on the newspaper’s website, it isn’t there anymore. And if you live in Texas and you’ve been looking for the religion section in the dead-tree-pulp edition of the Saturday newspaper, you won’t find it anymore — at least not in its old section-front format.
The best thing reporters can hear from editors is that they can have as much space as they need to tell the story. In an era of online publishing, this should be the case every time, but I don’t see reporters or their editors using that opportunity all that often.
Changing times are threatening for people who are directly affected by the changes. Thus, more than a few journalists are afraid of the World Wide Web and the digital era — with good reason. I mean, the entire news industry is shaking in its boots waiting for somebody, somewhere to create a form of digital advertising more winsome than the pop-up ad. Please.
Faithful readers of GetReligion will remember the name Jeremy Lott, who was part of our non-Borg for quite some time in the early days.
Greetings from the mountains of North Carolina, where the wonderful folks at the Dotcom Café have left their wireless working so that obsessed people can sit in the parking lot and do their email.
