Early last week, the New York Times posted an ad for a national correspondent for its religion, faith and values beat. It was part of a trifecta of hires of reporters *not* based in the Big Apple. One position is for someone to cover rural communities. Another is for someone to cover suburbs in a fast-growing place like Phoenix or Las Vegas.
It’s great that they’re trying to get out of the New York-Washington echo chamber. The rural areas job is especially intriguing.
These job postings are aimed at areas where the Times’ coverage is lacking. We all know the Times doesn’t get religion. Here are the quotes from executive editor Dean Baquet saying just that.
Here’s the job posting for a national correspondent covering religion, faith and values:
We are seeking an ambitious correspondent to explore the ways that religion and faith shape American life. This reporter, who must be a team player and expressive writer, should be relentlessly curious and offer readers fresh perspectives on belief and spirituality, and the shifting nature of faith in a country where a record number of Americans count themselves as nonreligious. You should have a record of creativity, boldness and breaking stories thanks to your deep sourcing.
This correspondent won’t need to be an expert in religious doctrine but should demonstrate a willingness to understand and empathize with diverse communities in their reporting. Only applicants eager to live outside of New York and Washington and to travel extensively around the country should apply.
So, what sentence there jumps out at you? How about this phrase: “This correspondent won’t need to be an expert in religious doctrine. …”
Like, this writer need not understand the Nicene Creed, which forms the base of worldwide Christian belief? Or why Orthodox Christians have major differences with the filioque phrase at the end? (More basically, shouldn’t this writer know what the filioque is?)
How about the five pillars of Islam (profession of faith, fasting, alms, pilgrimage and prayer) and why Muslims face east five times a day to pray?
How about the Ten Commandments? Major Jewish holidays, anyone?
Or why the debate over married priests is so fierce among Catholics that even Pope Francis is backing away from it? And why married clergy is not an issue among Protestants?
What does “doctrine” mean in this context? It would appear that Times editors think that “doctrine” is a nonessential on this beat, a lot of mumbo-jumbo about theology and ancient opinions about topics that they think the modern world has figured out.
This is not the first time the Times has used such weird language in a religion writer job announcement. In 2017, as tmatt relates here, they used the exact same phrase while looking for a faith-and-values correspondent.
I am not saying the right candidate has to be a seminary graduate (although several of us on the beat are). But they should know the answers to above questions. They should have lots of experience on this complicated beat, at the very least.
This is the New York Times, folks. You should not get hired there unless you’ve gotten a major track record elsewhere.
The Times –- and large newspapers like it -– are where folks turn to for expertise on things like politics, foreign policy, finance, fashion, even sports. We should expect that a religion reporter would know the difference between Baha’is and Baptists just as the Times expects its fashion writers to know the difference between Versace and Valentino.
As Buzzfeed has noted:
…the Times is also, now, a kind of Vatican of American journalism, and its direction will affect everyone else — so the internal choice is, sort of like the Democratic primary, of interest even to independents.
Love the Vatican analogy. Not everyone follows the Times piper. The Washington Post has three full-time religion writers on its staff, possibly because a new religion-and-politics story is birthed almost daily. But the Times does set the pace for many others.
The Times has hired specialists before. Joe Berger was a religion writer at Newsday before the Times hired him in 1984. Gustav Niebuhr was at the Atlanta Constitution-Journal, the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal before he went to the Times in 1994. Laurie Goodstein covered religion for the Post before she went to the Times in 1997. Elizabeth Dias was covering the beat for Time magazine before the Times picked her up in 2018.
All these folks were pretty up to speed on their religious doctrine, tradition and history before they showed up at the Times. These were high-quality hires that made a difference.
The Times has sent reporters into the hinterland before and we’ve noted how the writer missed that whole faith/morality/culture thing. I’m curious what the Times is hoping to get from this beat. I am not criticizing the hire. Believe me, I’m happy! My problem is with the job requirements or lack thereof. I have talked about this many times before. My late 2004 “Help Wanted on the Religion Beat” column for Poynter.org is the best-known of my writings on the topic and I expressed my concerns there with one of the Times more recent religion hires (who ended up not lasting very long).
Because all this brings to mind an incident back in November 1994 that occurred at the Washington Post when they were looking for a replacement for Niebuhr. The Post’s job announcement said in part, “The ideal candidate is not necessarily religious nor an expert in religion.”
That’s pretty close to what the Times ad says, doesn’t it? It was a Washington Times columnist, John McCaslin, who broke the story about that Post job announcement and a lot of protest followed.
As our own tmatt put it in the 2008 book, “Blind Spot: When Journalists Don’t Get Religion” phrased the problem in this way:
“Post editors are correct are correct in that the ‘ideal candidate’ is ‘not necessarily religious.’ What is controversial is the statement that the ‘ideal candidate’ is not necessarily ‘an expert in religion.’ They were, in effect, arguing that a lack of expertise and experience can be a plus – a virtue – when covering religion news.
That same chapter then quoted former Los Angeles Times religion editor Russell Chandler saying that newspaper editors ought to be raising the bar to covering religion, not lowering it.
Again from tmatt’s contribution to that book:
(Chandler) argues, “The religion beat is too complicated today for this kind of approach to be taken seriously. You need experience and if you don’t have experience, you have to pay your dues and get some. … (The Post’s ad was) like saying we want to sign up some people for our basketball team and we don’t really care whether or not they can play basketball or even if they want to play at all. Everything will be OK, because we’ll teach them to play the way we want them to play.”
The idea was they wanted a “fresh look” at this issue, as if an experienced reporter was only capable of boring, predictable articles.
Actually, an experienced reporter gains respect far more quickly than a newbie. I remember talking with a higher-up among the Southern Baptists many years ago who was appreciative with how insightful some of my questions were. Typically, he sighed, reporters didn’t have a clue about his faith and their reporting showed it.
One newspaper that has been mature about all this is the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette when it was casting about for a replacement for longtime veteran reporter Ann Rodgers. In 2013, it hired her replacement, Peter Smith, an experienced religion writer from the Louisville Courier-Journal. Smith’s career has taken off in Pittsburgh where he’s won numerous awards. In an era when major media make some truly mystifying hires when it comes to religion writers, a lot of us cheered the PG for going with an experienced hand.
So why does the Times continue with these inane we-could-care-less-about-doctrine job postings for a religion writer in a manner it would never dare do for other beats?
To editors at the Times: If you truly want to hear the voice of the dispossessed religious folks whose voices aren’t being heard anywhere in the media, then for God’s sake hire someone who gets those communities; who lives there and yes, worships there. Don’t hire a reporter who has zero experience working in this complicated territory. Show some respect for this beat.