Day after day, year after year (this week opened year 35 for my national “On Religion” column) I receive all kinds of “press releases” from people who want me to write columns about this, that or the other.
Some folks still send these printed on dead-tree pulp, if you can imagine that. The vast majority arrive via email or in press kits (mainly for books) via UPS, Fedex or the U.S. Postal Service.
I am happy to check out most of this material. However, about 90% or more of these offerings are sent by PR professionals who appear to have zero idea what I write about or the audience for my columns. They are simply throwing cheerful digital spaghetti at the wall and hoping something sticks.
In short, they do not understand “news” — what it is and what it is not.
What can religious leaders and/or organizations do to improve their success rates with reporters like me? That was half the equation that we discussed during this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in).
The other half? Just flip that reporter’s notebook around. How can reporters do a better job finding the right voices to include in their coverage of events and trends linked to religion? How can journalists convince clergy and other religious folks to cooperate with press coverage — especially when dealing with controversial topics and scandals?
The podcast was recorded while I was in Los Angeles for two forums hosted by the Poynter Institute under this title: “Telling the Stories of Faith and the Faithful.” The first forum was for reporters and editors, including quite a few who are not religion-beat specialists. The second day, yes, focused on talks with a small circle of religious leaders about understanding how journalists think and work.
We were talking about many of the same questions and issues on both days — only viewed from different sides of a reporter’s notebook (or smartphone, in this age). Here is a bite of the Poynter summary of the session with reporters:
The full day of training allowed journalists from all beats to better understand the ways in which faith traditions infuse our lives, and to consider how better to cover our communities with a faith-informed perspective.
Attendees got lots of advice from session leaders: how to remain humble and ask sensitive questions about religious traditions they didn’t understand, build relationships outside of breaking news events, and find the most helpful religious texts for understanding faith traditions (spoiler: it’s children’s literature). …
Lead instructor [Aly] Colón said the point of the full day of training was to combat bias and improve journalistic understanding of faith and the faithful, an area that diversity, equity and inclusion efforts sometimes skate over.
“What we’re trying to do is be alert to opportunities and to recognize that there’s not one thing that is Christian, or Muslim,” he said. “At the core, what you’re reporting on is people who follow a faith, and you’re going to try to help us understand the dimensions of that faith.”
Obviously, lots of the discussion on Day 1 centered on topics that have been discussed here at GetReligion for nearly 20 years. Day 2, to be honest, was like a flashback to my short tenure, long ago, teaching media studies and apologetics at Denver Seminary.
You see, many religious leaders assume that when reporters contact them, these scribes are simply looking for controversy that (All together now!) “sells newspapers.” This is, true — some of the time. But not all reporters and not all of the time.
Meanwhile, many reporters assume that religious leaders (and their PR teams) only contact newsrooms when they want fluffy, happy coverage. This is true — some of the time. But not all religious leaders and not all of the time.
The goal is to improve the odds of solid, meaningful contacts between people on both sides of the “blind spot” between the world of journalism and that of organized religion (in its myriad different forms). That’s what we were talking about during those two Poynter forums in Los Angeles.
How to sum all that up? That would be impossible, but you can listen to this rather detailed podcast.
Also, let me return to a paradox at the heart of all this — something I discussed recently in a GetReligion post and podcast about media coverage of the remarkable revival services at Asbury University (“Is the Asbury revival a 'news' story? Let's seek journalism advice from Screwtape”).
You see, deep down, many religious leaders assume that most journalists are not interested in religion or that they are actually hostile to faith (apathy is much more common). Most of all, they assume that journalists are trying — this brings us back to C.S. Lewis and the wisdom of Master Screwtape — to write about religion-AND, religion-PLUS.
Thus, faith isn’t “news” unless it is linked to some other topic that is already “news.” Way too often (#DUH) that something else needs to be politics or scandal, or maybe scandals about religion and politics.
Take that Asbury revival, for example. Concerning “The Screwtape Letters” I wrote:
In this classic, global bestseller a master demon writes letters to his nephew Wormwood, an apprentice in need of advice on how to lead a human soul into hell. The relevant text, in my musings on the “news value” of this Asbury revival, is Letter 25. The key passage states:
“The real trouble about the set your patient is living is that it is merely Christianity. … What we want, if men become Christians at all, is to keep them in the state of mind I call ‘Christianity AND.’ You know — Christianity and the Crisis, Christianity and the New Psychology, Christianity and the New Order, Christianity and Faith Healing, Christianity and Psychical Research, Christianity and Vegetarianism, Christianity and Spelling Reform. …”
In other words, national journalists may be trying to figure out what the “AND” is in this story.
If a “revival” is not news, what if this was “revival and smartphone sin”? Maybe “revival and Christian nationalism”? That would work. How about “revival and social justice,” since that is a relevant Methodist theme from the past? Does anyone doubt editors would fund coverage of repentant students, if they were confessing struggles with gender dysphoria?
I have suggested that the most accurate “AND” or “PLUS” in this Asbury case was revival in an era of stunningly high levels of anxiety, depression and confusion among young people and young adults. Dig into this online search file to see what I’m talking about.
Now, this may not be the best or the only way to think about organized religion and religious faith, in general. However, this is how most journalists think about religion news, most of the time.
News people need a news hook. Reporters need to be able to tell their editors why this tend or this event connects with the lives of real people in the real world.
Also, yes, there is much more to the world of religion than politics and scandal. But how can journalists and religious leaders learn to talk about that? And how can they learn to handle themselves, as First Amendment professionals, when it is time to talk about scandals and hard truths?
Enjoy the podcast and, please, pass it along to others — even the clergy people in your lives.
MAIN IMAGE: Collage of media images posted with an Arizona State University website feature, “ASU prof on the relationship between religion and the media.”