A novel approach by Associated Press reporter Tom Breen.
My father is a journalist, though, and it was his influence that steered me toward news. After college, I was working at the Daily Hampshire Gazette in Northampton, Mass., at the time the most recent sex abuse scandals began to break in Boston. Partly because I had some Catholic bric-a-brac on my desk, my editor assumed I actually knew something about the church, and so I was assigned to cover a few local stories related to the scandal.
I quickly realized that I didn’t know anything about Catholicism, and so to avoid embarrassing myself and the paper I resolved to learn what I could. In addition to reading everything I could get my hands on, I started pitching stories on religious topics that had nothing to do with the abuse scandal, hoping to bring myself up to speed.
I call this a novel approach considering how bad much of religion coverage is which is full of ignorance and axes to grind. The full story is well worth reading as found at GetReligion.
Tom Breen reminds of a former AP reporter Matt Baglio whose coverage of exorcism led him tow write the book The Rite which later resulted in the movie of the same name. He truly worked to cover the story with an investigative eye and ended up writing a informative and theologically concise book.
