Insiders’ view of how to get stories about religion into the press
from Religion Media Centre:
Journalists who report on religion gave an insiders view of how stories about religion make it into the press, during a Church Times webinar last night “Keeping Faith in Journalism”.
Kaya Burgess, science reporter and religious affairs correspondent at The Times, said for a story to get past the news editors, it didn’t have to be bad news, or a scandal, or controversial, it just had to have something that’s “slightly counter-intuitive”. The key question would be whether a reader going to work on the tube in the morning, flicking through the news, would stop on the story.
For John Bingham, formerly with The Telegraph and poached by the Church of England as head of news, stories where there is controversy or novelty get through the news desk, but there’s a whole other area he describes as “the interesting person says interesting thing” type story, where bishops can often succeed in getting a headline. He observed that “journalists are so much easier to deal with, than almost anyone else on a complicated issue because they get that there is complexity”.
Madeleine Davies, senior writer at The Church Times, said they were able to go into stories in depth and their audience expected more scrutiny from them: “It’s healthy to have a critical friend of the Church of England”. Asked to comment on the cuts to local journalism, she quoted concerns that the decimation of local press would have a huge effect on the holding to account of local institutions and was a worrying prospect.
Host Roger Bolton asked the panellists to comment on the reporting of stories including reparation for slavery and the impact of the Israel/Gaza war, and sought opinions on being neutral, coming under pressure not to tell a story and finding stories that were not negative.
The Church Times advertised throughout the webinar that it is offering free access to its website this month. The full discussion will be on the Church Times YouTube channel here.
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