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(Almost) wholly ungrounded

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As I read the story from the Citizen-Times.com website, I tried to remember a few basics about what it’s like to write for a paper in a smaller market. Local papers (as in Asheville, North Carolina) might not have a full-time religion reporter. They often don’t have space for longer articles, thus making it possible for details to get lost. And they may assume that their local readers know about churches and institutions that those of us surfing from “abroad” might not know.


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Red Iran, blue Iran

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Talk about a byline and a dateline that raised some eyebrows! The online folks at New York Magazine asked the obvious question in this headline: “Why Is Times Executive Editor Bill Keller in Iran?”


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Just the facts

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Elizabeth already discussed Barbara Bradley Hagerty’s five-part series on the science of spirituality. That ran on National Public Radio where she’s a reporter. The series came out of a book Hagerty wrote called Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality.


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Journalism from the inside out

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Stories about religous and moral controversies are about polity and denominations, protests and politics — but they are also, and mostly, about people. When a writer cares enough to spend time getting to know the people behind the positions, then it is possible (or more possible) for the journalist to let the story unspool invitingly without jumping in there with the exclamation points and scare quotes.


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Textbooks? What textbooks?

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Sometimes it’s surprising how little institutional memory the mainstream media has. Take this story from the New York Times, explaining a debate over a building plan by a Muslim school in Northern Virginia. Reporter Theo Emery explains that Islamic Saudi Academy officials in Fairfax, Virginia, are seeking permission to erect a new classroom building and move hundreds of students from another campus. But some neighbors are opposed because of congestion. Other neighbors have a different basis of opposition altogether:


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Woman abuses blog; anti-abortionists hardest hit

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Kim Janssen of the Chicago Tribune did a generally solid job with a delicate topic on Friday, telling the story of a woman who blogged about having a baby with Trisomy 13, then losing the baby to death soon afterward. This pregnancy, although fictional, drew on what blogger Beccah Beushausen said was her previous loss of a baby under similar circumstances.


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The Ratzinger Group, LLC

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A few months ago we looked at the lack of media coverage of an attempt by some Connecticut legislators to replace the Roman Catholic Church’s governing structure with a congregational system. Well, the media developed an interest in the story soon enough and the legislators were brushed back by a huge public uproar over the meddling.


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What did the dead cleric believe?

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You don’t have to read this blog very long to realize that your GetReligionistas are not fond of religious labels — especially inaccurate uses of words such as “fundamentalist” and the lazy use of vague, content-free words such as “moderate.”


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