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…

Rob Bell courtesy Beliefnet

Pastor/author Rob Bell launched a boisterous discussion last week when he attempted to define the word “evangelical” during an interview with the Boston Globe.   Here’s the exchange between reporter Michael Paulson and Rob Bell that’s been getting most of the attention:

Q. What does it mean to you to be an evangelical?

A. I take issue with the word to a certain degree, so I make a distinction between a capital E and a small e. I was in the Caribbean in 2004, watching the election returns with a group of friends, and when Fox News, in a state of delirious joy, announced that evangelicals had helped sway the election, I realized this word has really been hijacked. I find the word troubling, because it has come in America to mean politically to the right, almost, at times, anti-intellectual. For many, the word has nothing to do with a spiritual…