The other day I received an email from a former GetReligion colleague, the Rev. Elizabeth Eisenstadt-Evans, in which she posed an interesting question. She wanted an update on the status of my weekly “On Religion” column for the Scripps Howard News Service, including how many papers ran the column through Scripps or through the Newspaper Enterprise Association.
It was an absolutely crazy week in my day job and, well, I didn’t have a chance to promptly answer the email. That’s digital life, I am afraid. My bad.
There was, however, another journalistic reason for the delay. The simple fact is this: Since very few small- and medium-sized newspapers put wire-service products — like my column — on their websites, it’s hard to run an online search and answer that kind of question. I wish I knew the answer to that one, myself. I hear from people all the time responding to my columns, readers from places that I had no idea the column appeared.
Anyway, I really wish I had answered EEE’s email, since it is now clear what she was working on. She was working on a column for The Lancaster (Pa.) Journal about — you got it — the current state of the Godbeat in light of recent exits. Eisenstadt-Evans is a veteran reporter, freelancer and columnist, as well as an Episcopal priest.
So what we have here is yet another update, and a fine one at that, on the topic that our own Bobby Ross, Jr., and others have been covering over and over. Click here for a recent post that has links to commentary from Poynter.org, Bobby, Rod “friend of this blog” Dreher, myself and others.
Here at GetReligion, we don’t generally report the news. We critique media coverage of the news.
But when significant developments occur among Godbeat pros, we try to share that information with our faithful readers. That’s because we believe that it matters who’s covering the religion beat — and who isn’t.
Lately, we’ve had a number of these inside baseball developments to pass along, including the departures of three Godbeat stars: Bob Smietana from The Tennessean,Ann Rodgers from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Tim Townsend from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
OK, is everybody caught up now? Because the roller-coaster ride continues.
In a few of the posts mentioned above, we noted that Cathy Lynn Grossman, longtime religion writer for USA Today,took a buyout earlier this year. If USA Today has hired someone to fill Grossman’s post, we don’t know about it. But we can tell you where Grossman landed.
Many thanks to RNS for letting us know personally about Grossman’s new gig:
Rose French and Brad Schrade, husband and wife, are leaving for jobs at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Schrade — along with Jeremy Olson and Glenn Howatt — won a 2013 Pulitzer for their series of reports on the increase in infant deaths at daycare homes in Minnesota.
French will join the Atlanta newspaper’s education team as an enterprise reporter. In a memo cited by Poynter, Star-Tribune managing editor Rene Sanchez said:
Usually, we critique religion news here at GetReligion.
Occasionally, we report on significant developments on the Godbeat.
This is one of those times, although — as lightning fast as news travels in the social media age — many of you probably already heard this.
Bob Smietana, a regular GetReligion reader and commenter and the award-winning religion writer at The Tennessean, is leaving the secular news business.
Here’s the note that Lisa Green, Bob’s editor, sent to the staff:
He’s covered snake-handling preachers and mosque arson, lawbreaking charities and babies named Messiah. He’s introduced us to the guy who quit his job over 666 and the clergyman who says God doesn’t care if you smoke weed. And now I’m sad to announce that Bob Smietana will be leaving The Tennessean and taking his talents elsewhere. Bob has been our religion writer since 2007 and has been racking up awards all the way through – claiming first place just last month in the Tennessee Press Association contest for both feature writing (the snake handlers story) and best personal column, for his first-person account of his battle with diabetes. He has broken news both locally and nationally with his key connections on a passion-topic beat. He’ll be going across the railroad tracks to LifeWay, where he will be writing about research on church and cultural trends for Facts and Trends magazine. His last day with us will be Aug. 30. Please join me in wishing Bob well. We will miss him greatly. – Lisa Green
Bob’s impact on religion news has extended far beyond Nashville, as many of his stories have found a way to USA Today — also owned by Gannett — and Religion News Service, giving his work a strong national presence.
Bob shared his thinking with me:
It’s a big move. The reasons are mostly personal. Journalism is 24/7 right now and I can’t give it all my attention.
Being a husband and dad is my first priority. Am (I am) also excited about writing about religion research — am intrigued by sociology of religion.
Plus, (Ed) Stetzer and LifeWay Research do good work — respected by secular news pubs.
I personally consider Bob a friend, although he and I have sparred occasionally on this website. A time or two, we even have found it necessary to apologize to each other “off camera.” I attribute our few disagreements to the passion that we share for quality journalism and religion news.
Bob’s departure comes on the heels of USA Today religion writer Cathy Lynn Grossman taking a buyout earlier this year. If USA Today has hired a new religion writer, I have not heard about it.
And now Smietana’s impending departure leaves a big hole at The Tennessean — a newspaper that serves a city some refer to as the “buckle of the Bible Belt.”
Daniel Burke joined CNN Digital on Monday as co-editor of the Belief Blog. Burke comes to CNN from Religion News Service, where for the past seven years he covered everything from Amish funerals to the Zen of Steve Jobs. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, USA Today and The New York Times, and he has been recognized by the American Academy of Religion and the Religion Newswriters Association. He is based out of DC and reports to Meredith Artley, Managing Editor of CNN Digital.
Congrats, Daniel!
Burke’s departure, of course, created an opening at RNS.
Enter former star GetReligionista Sarah Pulliam Bailey, who will join RNS as a national correspondent in June.
No one on the national religion-news scenes writes with more vigor and enthusiasm about America’s sharp turn away from religious doctrine and traditional religious institutions than veteran scribe Cathy Lynn Grossman of USA Today. Her journalistic glee is completely justified, in my opinion, because this is one of the most important religion-beat stories of our age, especially on the religious left.
On one level, her latest piece on this topic — the headline is “Relationships are the new religion for many” — is best seen as part of the wave of mainstream coverage following the “Nones on the Rise” survey about the surging number of religiously unaffiliated Americans, research that grew out of a partnership between the Pew Forum on Religious & Public Life and the PBS program Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.
Toss in new research numbers from a number of other sources, such as the LifeWay team linked to the Southern Baptist Convention, and you have yet another chapter in the important story of do-it-yourself spirituality in postmodern America. The holy days hook at the top of the story, fleshed out with some name-specific anecdotes, is perfectly natural:
Emily Hilliard will cook a festive brunch with friends on Easter Sunday. But none in her Washington, D.C., social circle of foodies, folklorists and fiddlers will go to church that day.
In Denver, Ambra Vibran will enjoy an Italian feast with cousins that Sunday. But she says, “My spiritual life is in hiking, skiing, kayaking and enjoying God’s creation.” It’s a stretch to recall when Vibran last went to church.
Eleanor Drey plans a Jewish traditional meal where family and friends will talk about freedom. But it won’t be on Passover, Monday night this year. Folks are tied up with their kids’ spring vacations. They’ll gather at Drey’s San Francisco home in April instead.
The new data kicks in at the summary paragraph, where the line between the religiously devout and the new American normal is made quite clear. This is long, but you need to read it in order to get Grossman’s main point:
This week, most Americans will celebrate essential stories of Christianity and Judaism: God freeing the enslaved is a key Passover theme. Easter’s core is Jesus’ resurrection, offering a doorway to salvation.
But many will celebrate with a twist. While 73% of Americans call themselves Christian, only 41% say they plan to attend Easter worship services, according to a March 13 survey of 1,060 U.S. adults by LifeWay Research, a Nashville-based Christian research agency. Passover is a home-centered celebration, but it’s not known how many Jews plan to recite the prayers and serve symbolic foods at their Seder meal.
In the gap between faith and practice are millions of people who will delight in Easter and Passover as “holidays,” not “holy days.” They’re just as Christian, just as Jewish, in their own eyes as people who follow traditional scripts — church on Sunday before carving the ham or the Seder rituals before slurping the matzoh ball soup. They’ve simply redefined their spirituality to center on the people at the table — shared time, shared values with their nearest-and-dearest.
“Relationships have replaced religion for many Millennials,” says Esther Fleece, who spent three years specializing in outreach to young adult Christians for the evangelical group Focus on the Family.
Now, the only part of that I would question is Grossman’s summary judgment that these believers consider themselves “just as Christian, just as Jewish” as traditional believers. To be more specific, the only words in that summary that I want to question are “just as” — as opposed to millions of Americans still calling themselves Christian or Jewish, but then turning around and saying, something like “but I choose not to sit in a pew” like those who are still affiliated with traditional religious institutions.
They consider themselves “just as” Christian, “just as” Jewish as the orthodox? I’m reading the same surveys, but I don’t see that judgment in the numbers — although it’s in a few of the anecdotes. I see numbers suggesting that the unaffiliated people are saying, “but I still consider myself Christian” or “I still consider myself Jewish.”
So here is the key question. How does one interpret the personal identity being articulated in the following quote:
This week’s celebration of Ash Wednesday has prompted several stories built around the theme of “ashes to go” — a recent phenomena of liturgical Protestant church ministers — (I’ve seen reports of Methodist, Episcopal and Lutheran clergy involved) imposing ashes on the foreheads of individuals in public places outside of the confines of worship.
(Yes, “imposing” is the correct verb to describe the act of a cleric daubing an ash covered thumb on the forehead of a penitent. The rite is called the imposition of ashes.)
Theses stories from the Dallas Morning News entitled “Doughnuts, coffee and Ashes to Go?” is typical of the genre, as is the Baltimore Sun’s “Lenten observers take their Ashes to Go,” and the Philadelphia Inquirer‘s “Modern-day Lent: Ashes to Go.” Each conforms to the general pattern of a description of what took place; an explanation of what the ashes symbolize, a quote from someone receiving the ashes and an explanation from one of the clergy explaining why they do it. Some stories go a bit deeper and note that this practice began in St Louis in 2007 and has slowly spread amongst mainline churches.
What I have not seen in this year’s crop (though I have not made an exhaustive search of today’s newspapers) is a contrary voice saying this practice is improper. Happy voices predominate and no hard questions are asked.
Compare these stories to Cathy Lynn Grossman’s 2012 piece entitled “For some, ashes in a flash for Lent”. While it includes the elements of the stories cited above, the USA Today story also asks a spokesman for the Catholic Church what they think of the idea.
Catholic priests won’t be dishing out ashes at bus stops. The Catholic Church teaches ashes should be received within a church, during a service with Scripture, prayer and calls for repentance, says Sister Mary Ann Walsh, spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
USA Today also asked the Episcopal priest who began “ashes to go” in 2007 what her theological reasons were for taking the imposition of ashes outside of the church building.
The Rev. Emily Mellott of Calvary Church in Lombard, Ill., and author of AshesToGo.org, describes the simple sign as a profound experience. “The ashes are an invitation, opening the door for us to the practices of Lent, a first step, a reminder of our mortality and God’s creative power,” says Mellott, who plans to stand at a commuter train stop today. “We take that invitation and that core truth out into places where people really need that. People who come to church already get the forgiveness thing.”
Anyone can accept the ashes, although non-Christians tend not to seek them. If they do, Mellott says, “we view it as an act of evangelism, and we make it clear this is a part of the Christian tradition.”
By seeking contrary voices and offering a theological explanation, USA Today wins best in show for the ashes to go stories.
I should wrap the story up at this point. I’ve identified why one particular story works best and highlighted the religion ghosts in others.
Even though the Pope joining Twitter has been news for weeks, I was still surprised at what a big story it was yesterday. I’ve been on Twitter for years (joined the morning after an epic anti-Twitter rant at the local pub) and I don’t even have 4,000 followers. Even before the Pope had issued his first tweet, he had more than 1 million followers. He tweeted his first item yesterday. Or as Rocco Palmo put it, #HabemusPapam.
And yes, everyone got super excited. The cool thing was that there was some really great coverage of the piece. And I’m not talking about The Onion‘s hilarious “Pope To Identify With Catholic Youth By Giving Up On Catholicism” satire. We’ll get to the better stuff in a minute.
One religion reporter sent us something that she thought was not so hot. She was too kind. It read like it was written by a teenager who thinks he’s a lot funnier than than he is. Headlined, “Mockery outweighs piety after pope’s Twitter debut,” the AFP story begins:
VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict XVI’s debut on Twitter got off to a bumpy start on Wednesday, with mockery outweighing piety in reaction to the first tweets from the leader of the world’s 1.1 billion Catholics.
The pope’s second tweet — “How can we celebrate the Year of Faith better in our daily lives?” — prompted a string of tongue-in-cheek- answers.
“With some nice cold chocolate milk. And the Lord?” wrote one user tweeting in Portuguese with the handle @tensoblog.
Another distinctly sin-minded user, @binnie, joked: “Hookers and blow.”
Hardy har har har har har. Anyway, the claim made by the news outlet is that mockery outweighed piety. The story doesn’t even come close to substantiating this claim. It doesn’t even try. It leaves out information that might have thrown the claim into question. For instance, there’s no mention that the Pope had, say, 50,000+ “retweets” or close to 20,000 “favorites.”
Is a story about the friendly jokes — and the unfriendly mockery — worthwhile? Perhaps. Perhaps that’s what you want to emphasize. But to claim that the Pope’s Twitter debut got off to a rocky start and that mockery outweighed other reactions is more media wishful thinking than reality. Let’s stick to reality in journalism, please. And if you do want to do a story about people who curse, mock, tweet risque pictures at the Pope, could you at the very least move it beyond the “OMG! Naughty words to B16!” level of discourse? What does this say about people who would do such a thing? How does it make Catholics feel? What do the Pope’s people think about this? Etc.
It may look as if Pope Benedict XVI’s first tweet on the auspicious date of 12/12/12 will be a divine act. But orchestrating the pontiff’s debut on Twitter has been a far more earthbound effort, involving an elaborate behind-the-scenes production…
The effort is part of Twitter’s powerful — not to mention low-cost — strategy to expand its influence and rack up more users by getting the world’s biggest names in sports, Hollywood, government and religion onto the Internet’s leading megaphone for self-promotion.
But man is that a bad opening line, right? Why would it look like a divine act? Why is 12/12/12 “auspicious”?
The Post‘s On Faith section also had a great reaction roundup from a variety of different observers. Sample:
The pope’s Twitter feed is going live. I’m excited. While this is an excellent opportunity for young Catholics to encounter the church’s teachings, I suspect that this open line of communication will be utilized by some to be able to curse directly at the pope. Do you know how many four-letter words you can fit in a 140 character limit? I don’t have a calculator handy but I’m pretty sure it’s a lot!
But Christians are quite familiar with lion’s dens. Have been for a while. And let’s face it, real lions don’t just curse in ALL CAPS and use clever hashtags.
But the pope getting on Twitter does raise some interesting issues. If you don’t retweet the pope, is that a sin of omission?
If the pope “follows you” doesn’t that really set the Church hierarchy upside down? Do I really want that kind of responsibility? I don’t even have a mitre.
And if you get blocked by the pope is that a 21st century form of excommunication? Are we really about to see the birth of the excommunitweet? Because that would actually be pretty awesome.
Among his other observations are that the Beatitudes are written in 140 characters or less.
Actually, rather than doing this entire roundup, I should have just directed you to Cathy Lynn Grossmann’s comprehensive look in USA Today at the Benedict’s first day on Twitter. She looks at whose questions got asked, the specifics of how questions to the pope got answered, the Vatican’s use of Twitter up to this point, selections from Archbold’s comments, and more.
The Godbeat (or religion beat) is in the middle of some major shifts again, ones that can leave glaring holes in several newspapers across the country.
First, the important thing that’s not changing: I still cover religion — the best beat on the print/Web/smartphones/tablets-you know-what-I-mean. Many great stories lie ahead.
However, how and where you find my work — and top wire stories and the best of Gannett’s religion correspondents such as Bob Smietana at The Tennessean — will change.
Several digital subject-area pages, including the online religion page, will vanish as stories are mainstreamed into News. If you read on a smartphone or tablet, you won’t notice any change. But if you read religion coverage at USATODAY.com on your laptop, these stories will be running in News, Nation and Politics, just as they already do in print.
So this is not good-bye. It’s more of a change-of-address notice.
You can find my stories with a Google alert on my byline (don’t forget that pesky Lynn in the middle) or as my friend on Facebook. My new Twitter handle is @CLGrossman. You can also e-mail me at cgrossman@usatoday with your ideas and thoughts.
Don’t I sound chipper? Well, sure, I’m a little sad. This has been exhausting, glorious fun!
On one hand, it’s nice to see editors who want to incorporate religion into the national, politics and other section beats. On the other hand, its nice for religion to have its own outlet, its own silo if you will. It allows a reporter like Grossman to cover specific stories without having to make the case for national news. But if you’re a company like Gannett that owns USA Today, you’re thinking about whether that reporting time is making $$.
It’s certainly a tumultuous time for the religion beat as newspapers are desperately trying to make money. Sadly, while religion trends really well on the internet, it doesn’t make a lot of money in traditional newspaper sections, since religious organizations don’t advertise as heavily as those who want to place ads in a section like sports or business. It just isn’t an obvious money-making beat.
In recent months, we’ve noticed Tom Breen has left the Associated Press, Kate Shellnutt left the Houston Chronicle, Bruce Nolan left the Times-Picayune, Meredith Heagney left the Columbus Dispatch, Joshunda Sanders left the Austin American-Statesman, several reporters have left to run websites for RNA/RNS, and some reporters are still freelancing religion stories or are still in the religion writing world, but many aren’t doing it for a traditional mainstream outlet. Did I miss others who should be noted? This is just off the top of my head. Or, are there new people on the Godbeat we should be watching?
It’s hard not to feel a little depressed about the lack of reporters who are dedicated to following and covering religion. Yes, anyone can write a religion story. But not everyone can write one with the sensitivities a reporter needs to understand history and context. We would love to see the religion revive itself in some way. Are there ways of doing that? Do chime in, especially if you an offer a new business model.
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