A rocky period for religion writers

Greetings from Washington, where I'll be blogging for the next few days from the annual convention of the Religion Newswriters Association, which is an organization made up of the small fraternity of journalists who regularly write about faith for the mainstream press (i.e. not for denominational or other religious publications).

This is a tough time for the news business generally -- we have more readers than ever, thanks to the Internet, but fewer and fewer of them pay anything to read us, also thanks to the Internet -- and the religion beat is suffering collateral damage. I've been on the beat for eight years now. When I started, the beat was thought to be on an upswing, as a lot of major newspapers had been investing more talent and resources in coverage of religion, and playing the stories more prominently. But the economic woes of the industry, combined with the unexpectedly rapid shift of readers to the web, have not been kind the beat. The Dallas Morning News, which year after year was recognized for having the best religion section in the nation, eliminated its standalone section. At the nation's biggest newspapers, the number of people assigned to religion appears to have dropped as beat reporters have left and not been replaced. Bill Lobdell, a former religion writer at the LA Times, recently wrote (in a blog item headlined, "The death of the religion beat"), "When I first was put on the religion beat for the Los Angeles Times, I was the fourth full-time reporter covering faith for the newspaper. Today, there is one reporter — who...has often been pulled to cover other types of stories." At smaller newspapers, the beat has been eliminated, or beat reporters have been asked to juggle multiple subjects.

The impact on the beat of the audience migration to the Internet has been harder to measure, but my own sense is that the hunger for sizzle and flash on the web (driven by the focus on traffic and clicks), has, at least temporarily, reduced the visibility of the religion beat at many publications. One of the subjects the 120 religion reporters who are gathering here this week will be discussing is how best to represent religion journalism on the Web. Obviously this blog represents an effort on my part, and that of the Globe, to at least experiment with using this voicier, and photo-rich, format, as a way to engage more of our many Internet readers with the religion beat. But we are still figuring out how to do that without diminishing what we offer the still-large audience for traditional journalism (i.e. detailed, nuanced, original stories, whether they are read in print or on the Web).

All gatherings of journalists these days are filled with the gnashing of teeth and wringing of hands, and this gathering will be no exception. Just within the last few weeks, several veteran religion writers -- Sandi Dolbee of the San Diego Union-Tribune and Tom Heinen of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel among them -- have announced they are taking buyouts. Earlier this year, Mark Pinsky of the Orlando Sentinel was laid off, and I just got an e-mail from Ari Goldman, a former religion writer for the New York Times, and now a professor at Columbia Journalism School, saying that the Daily News is killing his religion column. From Ari's e-mail:

"My editors at the Daily News called last week to tell me that they were cutting the 'On Religion' column that I’ve been writing twice monthly now for a year and a half. They are facing another series of staff layoffs and a diminishing news hole, they told me. They reached me, of all places, in Rome where I was attending a conference on covering the Vatican. I managed to squeeze out one last column, datelined Vatican City...It’s been a great run and I hope to find other venues for my religion writing, but this is yet another reminder (as if we need one) of the precarious state of our business."

GetReligion, a web site that critiques religion coverage, weighed in on the state of the beat last month, in an item headlined, "RIP: The religion beat?" An excerpt from the post, by Terry Mattingly:

"The problem, of course, is that there is more religion news out there than ever, not less, and the beat is getting more complex, not less. On one level, we have to see this religion-beat crisis as a reflection of what is happening in the news industry. There is no painless way to cut a shrinking pie. Yet, of course, the news pie is not shrinking. It’s changing into forms that do not include solid, workable forms of advertising. A key element of American public life and discourse is hanging, twisting slowly in the wind, waiting for someone to create an ad form more winsome than those pop-up mini-monsters that we all hate so much. However, do not click “comment” and tell me that you get all the news you need from the Internet and from blogs. It takes real money to pay people to report and edit real information. Most of what happens in weblogs — like this one, frankly — is secondary writing and criticism. We are all like those little fish stuck on the flanks of big sharks. Someone has to fund the shark, which does the real hunting."

Stay tuned.