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Ask religion reporters to name the part of the beat that bugs them the most and a high percentage (give me your estimates, Godbeat walkers) will say that they worry about finding new, valid, interesting stories linked to religious holidays.
You might consider Associated Press reporter Tom Breen to be the anti-William Lobdell. Breen recently told me he eventually became a weekly Mass attendee after educating himself on the Catholic abuse scandals for his journalism job. His story is quite the opposite from Lobdell, whose work on the religion beat at the Los Angeles Times caused him to drop his faith and write Losing My Religion.
No matter how high a reporter’s aspirations, there’s something about filing stories for the local police blotter that’s always enchanting. A few days ago, a local reporter for the Beaver County Times found himself a pretty big public interest story.
We have had some fascinating comments about my recent posts (here and here) noting the lack of mainstream media coverage of the Iranian proceedings against Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani — who was accused of apostasy for converting to Christianity, even though he had never practiced Islam after coming of age.
As you might have heard, the national pastime’s regular season ended Wednesday night in a ho-hum sort of way.
I’d like to look at a fairly recent Washington Post story about drone warfare. But before we look at it, let’s go back to June and look at a New York Times story on the same topic. Headlined “War Evolves With Drones, Some Tiny as Bugs,” the article is about the growth of drones. There were fewer than 50 a decade ago. Now there are 7,000. Some spy as well as strike. Manned aircraft are on the way out while the Air Force is training more remote pilots.
I’m still using Google News to search for mainstream news media reports on the fate of the Iranian pastor who faces the death penalty for being a Muslim apostate, even though he has never practice Islam.
Let’s pretend for a minute that you get to spend 30 minutes with any presidential candidate. What questions would you ask? How would you shape those questions that makes sense for your readership?
