At the moment, the state of religion coverage is somewhere between “evolving” and “on life support.” Cutbacks in top-40 newsrooms — organizations that once had the resources to support a variety of specialty reporters — have sent many veteran scribes into early retirement.
More than a dozen print newsrooms have reduced or eliminated their religion-news jobs in the past three years. However, the amount of religion news remained surprisingly steady in 2009, at 0.8 percent, compared with 1.0 percent in 2008, according to a study by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
Not exactly pertinent to the story, but for decades now, I’ve noticed
that religious news was, very typically, placed on a page
facing the obits. Why ? As years went by, I gradually grew quite
annoyed that there was an association of religion with something
as unpleasant at death. Did newspaper editors do this because they
had had bad experiences at church or Sunday school ?
I don’t know #1, but what I noticed was that religion stories were generally relegated to some obscure position in the Saturday paper, buried where few people would see them. And while I can’t speak in any informed way about newspaper editors, it’s well-known that journalism is a field where the percentage of earnest Christians was and is pathetically low. Sure, there are exceptions, but for whatever reason (some attirbute it to the habitual skepticism that a good reporter needs), there seem to have been many journalists (whether in print, boradcast, or web-based journalism) that, as you say, appear to have “had bad experiences” in church or Sunday School.
It’s only anecdotal evidence from my own city, Richmond, but the local paper, the Richmond Times Dispatch (in the Gennett system) eliminated its very part-time religion writer almost ten years ago. And the result has been that even though Richmond is in the so-called Bible Belt or church-going Southeast, the paper’s coverage of religious events and stories has dropped in both quantity and more importantly, quality.
David Handy+