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The most interesting bit from the recent Romanian crucifixion horror story, to me, was the clash between religious Romanians and the press. We’ll join the story midstream and then circle back for more details and analysis. I know this is a long excerpt, but please try to slog through:
The last week of the Summer Institute of Journalism is over at the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities. This was our last journalism boot camp there, until the fall of 2006 when we open a new full-semester j-program for this international network of Christian academic institutions — basically everyone from the Assemblies of God to the Mennonites. It’s a big tent. This is the job that will, in a month, move me back to the D.C. area.
So you’re the manager of a PBS station. It’s pledge drive time. You want to a) rake in the dough and b) get viewers to encourage Congress not to pull the plug on federal funding. Who do you turn to?
Ugh, not a good morning. Suffice it to say that the casa de Lott has woodpecker problems and I’m not laughing. Readers, how do you tell a woodpecker to get lost? Bear in mind that I can’t get a clean shot at him and I’ve already tried the “Hey, let’s try some knocking too to see how you like it!” trick. I think he thought he’d found a mate.
The Times of London’s Ruth Gledhill is ecstatic at the appointment of John Sentamu, the Uganda-born Bishop of Birmingham, as the next Archbishop of York:
It looks like the first casualty in D.C.’s newspaper wars (started when the Examiner moved into town) is the ugly, hard-to-navigate design of the old Washington Times website. Good riddance, I say.
Want to read the hellish Godbeat story of the day? It’s in The Washington Post, with the headline “Mississippi Turning.” Yes, it’s rather old New Journalism in its approach. Lots of one word sentences. Many. A lack of verbs. Reporter Neely Tucker hovers everywhere in that analysis way that the Post favors in its edgy Style pages.
Ruth Gledhill of the Times of London has done a fine job of condensing the Archbishop of Canterbury’s 4,500-word lecture on journalists into a news story of one-ninth that length. As journalists often do — and I make no claim to escaping this habit — Gledhill focused on the most pointed language in the archbishop’s text, in which he said this about web-based journalism:
