Understanding Journalism

Have you ever wondered why every story on Christianity in America sounds so similar? "How does this pastor relate to politics?" "How does this church relate to right-wing politics?" "What does this sect think of homosexuals or abortion or women in ministry?"

Well I think if we are to understand the task of journalists we have to understand THEIR job. As I see it, part of their job, certainly not all of it, is to take your story and put it in a form their reader's will understand and want to read. Here is an anecdote that illustrates this point (taken from the book Made to Stick):

Nora Ephron still remembers her first day of journalism class. Although the students had no journalism experience, they walked into their first class with a sense of what a journalist does: A journalist gets the facts and reports them. To get the facts, you track down the five W's -- who, what, when, where, and why.
As students sat in front of their manual typewriter's, Ephron's teacher announced the first assignment. They would write the lead of a newspaper story. The teacher reeled off the facts: "Kenneth L. Peters, the principal of Beverly Hills High School, announced today that the entire high school faculty will travel to Sacramento next Thursday for a colloquium in new teaching methods. Among the speakers will be anthropologist Margaret Mead, college president Dr. Robert Maynard Hutchins, and California Governor Edmund Brown.
The budding journalists sat at their typewriters and pecked away at the first lead of their careers. According to Ephron, she and most of the other students produced leads that reordered the facts and condensced them into a single sentence: "Governor Pat Brown, Margaret Mead, and Robert Maynard Hutchins will address the Beverly Hills High School faculty Thursday in Sacramento...blah, blah, blah."
The teacher collected the leads and scanned them rapidly. The he laid them aside and paused for a moment.
Finally, he said, "The lead to the story is "There will be no school next Thursday."

More on the implications of this for Christianity next post.