The economic downturn has obviously hurt newspapers a great deal, but it’s hard to say which areas of coverage have been depleted the most. I have talked to people in many realms — international reporting, business, sports, entertainment — who claim their domain has been particularly hard hit. (Here’s a map from Paper Cuts that shows 2009 newspaper layoffs.)
But Cathleen Falsani, the Chicago Sun-Times‘s recently departed religion writer, makes the point that she is just one of four prominent religion writers who have been moved off their beats in the past month. The others are Michael Paulson of the Boston Globe, Eric Gorski at the A.P., and Peter Steinfels at The Times. This hardly means that religion will no longer be covered at those institutions, but that’s an awful lot of high-end human capital to leave one beat in a short time. I wonder what kind of religion articles we won’t be reading in the future as a result.
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In America, Religion has been trying to monopolize the politics section for considerably longer than 10 years — 30 years if you start with Jerry Falwell and the so-called Moral Majority.
Might as well pile on to this one.
Religion is silly.
Those writers never explored the biggest issue about religion: the suicide bombers. The fact is that religion needs to be phased out as it’s outdated. With one particular religion, you have fundamentalists, radicals, and those foaming at the mouth with a death grip on the hijacked plane’s flight yoke.
They were probably all let go because they weren’t bringing in enough prophets…
Some newspapers have cut whole departments, including a major Washington-area paper getting rid of it’s sports section. And we’re supposed to care about 4 religion writers cut?
How refreshing to see comments that users do not regard religious writing as “intellectual capital”. There is hope.
Maybe the writers of CSI “yourcity” will replace them with the science of why things really happen.
Wow – quite a number of hostile comments.
I neither follow nor like the National Basketball Association, but understand why a sports page would have NBA coverage. There are many compelling issues to explore in matters of religion – and the coverage I’m referring to is not about proselytizing a particular tenet of a faith tradition, but how those traditions evolve and interact with their creeds, changing social norms, and each other.
I’m not sure the “religion journalism” has been particularly good over the years, so part of me won’t miss the routine storylines which are inserted into familiar formulas. That said, there should be room for smart writing about issues which are deeply important to millions.
I teach college. I am studying to receive a Ph.D. I am a student of logic. I say this because I don’t wish to appear like some sniveling follower clinging to my religion. (My brother is a nuclear engineer …) I have studied my religious faith for my entire life — I am one of those Mormons and I love the Book of Mormon — and prayed a great deal. I assert that just because religion doesn’t use the methodology of science doesn’t mean it doesn’t provide access to truth through coherent, consistent means — like prayer and fasting and “experimenting” on the words to see what they produce. Numerous, real experiences too sweet for words convince me that there is a God. It is a shame that religion doesn’t get the credit it deserves in news pages. It can be interesting, insightful and deeply meaningful. Along with everything else declining in American journalism, this is a genuine loss, even as I don’t always agree with what the writers have produced over the years.