Spencer Tracy, courtesy of TCM Photo Gallery. (Everything I ever needed to know about reporting I learned from the movies. Sort of.)

There have been reductions in the number of reporters who write about religion full-time at all of the nation’s biggest newspapers [...]. The surviving newspaper religion sections are getting smaller. And at many small and mid-sized newspapers, reporters now juggle coverage of religion with other, often unrelated, subjects, and religion often gets short shrift.

So wrote Michael Paulson of the Boston Globe last month, in an article about the annual meeting of the Religion Newswriters Association entitled “Religion reporting: An endangered beat?”  He went on to note that on-line writing about the subject, especially blogging, has increased, but that

Much of the on-line work is focused on a particular faith group, and is written from a particular ideological or theological perspective, which differentiates it from traditional religion journalism. At the most recent denominational…