By Christine Rayner
In newsrooms, politics will always be dominant and stories about religion or science can still fight to get the biggest slots.
So said Kaya Burgess, religion and science reporter for The Times, who was one of a panel of five reporters of religion who gave insights on their work in a discussion chaired by Rosie Dawson at the fifth Religion Media Festival in north London.
He told the festival audience that he had been reporting on religious issues for a few years when he took on science as an additional specialism at The Times. The result has been a series of features and news stories focusing on each — and on occasions combining the two.
How do religion and science sit in a journalist’s portfolio, he was asked. Rather well, he said.
He explained: “The difference between the two patches is that there are dozens of science journals publishing studies every day, whereas with religion there are reports that get issued occasionally.”
Much of his writing was the result of “going out and talking to people, meeting people, interviewing them and you have more of your own sort of schedule for finding stories, rather than this sort of daily flow”.
The emerging story of allegations of historic abuse in the Soul Survivor Church in the UK had presented issues for Mr Burgess and fellow journalists. He feared readers were overwhelmed by the number of accusations surrounding many churches worldwide and it was important to consider why this story was different and why it was important.
The Soul Survivor allegations, which came to light first in an investigative piece by Gabriella Swerling of The Daily Telegraph had been “floating around for a very, very long time” and were only now being investigated, about 20 years later. That was perhaps the real angle on the story, he said.
He made the point that articles in The Times were for a general readership, all faiths and none. So, he was looking for interesting news stories, which might be a leader’s intervention in a political debate, a social affairs story to do with charity work or an angle on an event, for example the World Cup.
Britain loves stories about institutions, he said. People were fascinated by them and the stories of what was going on within them, often with vigorous argument.
Madeleine Davies, who writes for the Church Times, said there were important stories to be told about the Church of England, though many headlines could be quite negative.
She said it was baptism of fire to start reporting on the Church of England and learn about its divisions, traditions and politicking. She agreed with Rosie Dawson that it was sometimes like reporting on cats in a sack. But her role was to portray the different factions: “I try to present something objective, which gives the different wings a voice,” she said.
She was asked how she dealt with the never ending stories of abuse and argument: “I think that is a serious point and that it does have an impact. If you actually bring your faith to work, and then you’re constantly writing about an institution where there is abuse, and there’s division, it really does corrode you.
“So, I think you do have to have links outside your job, where your own faith and your own spirituality gets looked after.”
The panel included other reporters who write for particular audiences. Burhan Wazir is the editor of Hyphen Online, a website with 12 journalists reporting on predominantly Muslim news across Europe, including the UK.
He said the website was formed because there was an increasing awareness that Muslim communities in Europe are complicated, younger and no longer homogenous. And their daily lives and decisions were not being accurately reflected in the media.
Covering news stories relating to Muslims presented unique challenges, he said, and the increasing diversity of followers of Islam kept his team on their toes. “It’s a kind of 360-degree view of what Muslim life in Europe looks like,” he said.
Hyphen commissioned a survey among 1,500 Generation Z Muslims aged 18 to 24 from across the UK, inviting their views on issues such as getting on the property ladder and finding a satisfying career. It found that young Muslims were particularly hit by the cost-of-living crisis because they were expected to donate a percentage of their income to their parents to support the family.
He shared details of the story of how artificial intelligence was changing Friday prayers for small groups of Muslims across the UK. Younger imams were using it to write their sermons and regarded it as a great labour-saving resource, producing a more coherent and relevant message than they might have done without it. However, there was no general agreement within the community on the benefits of AI, Mr Wazir said.
“To me, that is almost like the perfect religious story. Here you have a small group of Muslims within a larger group of Muslims, wrestling with, or embracing, this new technology, which is ultimately going to have a huge impact, not just on Muslims in the UK, but people from all over the faith.”
Promoting the highs and lows of the Jewish community provides news editor Justin Cohen with a busy working life. Mr Cohen, who has been with Jewish News since joining for work experience 22 years ago, said he loved the ethos of the free, hyper-local newspaper but said that did not mean there were no big issues to pursue.
“We run the hard-hitting stuff and seek to get the big interviews first, but one of our raisons d’être is very much to celebrate and to highlight the positivity within the community,” he added.
Editing what is essentially a local newspaper also involved discussion of issues in Israel, Mr Cohen acknowledged. “The far-right element within the Israeli government is something we’ve been focusing on quite heavily since November — even before this government came to power,” he said. “We felt we wanted to do that partly because we thought we were reflecting a majority opinion within the community, whatever that means.
“In the same way we would fight to expose antisemitism or expose other forms of hatred, the fact there were members of, potentially, a new Israeli government expressing Islamophobic and homophobic views — albeit in the past — was something we should equally fight for.”
He felt his work had a relevance, a connection in some way to his family and friends and that was something he really enjoyed about the job.
Amardeep Bassey, a freelance journalist, started by reporting on communities in which he lived. A Sikh by tradition, he comes from Birmingham, a city with 180 different nationalities. He said he had to find out about the different faiths to understand and report the communities.
Aspiring young journalists looking to make their name in reporting religion should first get a general grounding in the industry, he said. He shared details of his career path, saying he avoided the pitfalls of being pigeonholed as “the guy who only does Asian stories, or only stories to do with his religion”, but at some point he saw that he could use his skills as a general journalist to seek out the ethnic communities that were under-represented in the national media.
He found: “There is no homogenous Muslim community or Sikh community. There are minorities within minorities, who never get their stories told. And so I made it my business to find out about all these different strands of Islam, of Sikhism, of Hinduism.”
This insight had led to in-depth reporting of ethnic tensions and fractures, as for example in Leicester or 20 years ago, riots in Birmingham.
Mr Bassey said there had been much discussion about the need for diversity in newsrooms, but he questioned whether just bringing in “more black or brown faces” would improve the quality of journalism. There was a need for quality training.
He said any journalist with a particular religious belief could certainly add something to a news team, although there were also opportunities for reporting on other issues.
The panel was asked to name a standout story which had been the most exciting moment in their career.
Madeleine Davies pointed to a story about autistic people in church, which had encouraged an autistic man who wrote to tell her so. She spoke of the challenge of covering Church of England stories in a climate of negativity, but said she loved interviewing members of the church family who were “doing amazing things, like clergy in small parishes no one had ever heard of, or young churchgoers and the sort of lives they lead”.
She added: “I think it’s really nice to be able to show that it’s kind of still a living faith and that it shapes people’s lives in a really positive way and has a wider impact on British society.”
For Kaya Burgess, the dual science and religion role has thrown up remarkable stories on how religion is trying to stay relevant. There was the story of astronomers in Birmingham who used specialist cameras to detect the first light of dawn, to help provide a more consistent approach to times for prayer.
And then there was Nasa’s grant of $1million to a theological college in the United States, asking theologians to find out how world religions would react if life were found on another planet, opening big questions of creation and life. “That was an absolutely fascinating chance to put science reporter and religious affairs correspondent on an article,” he said.
