After the 60th annual convention of the Religion Newswriters Association, Michael Paulson reflects on the future of religion journalism:
The beat is not likely to disappear entirely from the mainstream media, and there is still a lot of great work being done. There is a huge amount of writing about religion in new media—blogs and other online publications—some of which break news, and some of which comment on news broken by others. But much of the online work is focused on individual faith groups and is written from a particular ideological or theological perspective, which differentiates it from traditional religion journalism. At the most recent denominational conventions I have attended, bloggers and reporters for religious publications have easily outnumbered reporters for secular publications.
A final, and related, trend that I see is an increase in religious denominations reporting about themselves. I participated in a conference at Utah State University earlier this year and attended a presentation about how, in light of the decline of the religion beat, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is more aggressively telling its own story, through blogging and Facebook and Twitter. It now seems clear that the Catholic bishops’ conference is doing the same thing, and the Episcopal Church appears to be moving in a similar direction.
Read the full article here.