New names are in—first we did it, and now my bosses did too. The USC Annenberg School for Communication has added "& Journalism" to its moniker. In both our cases, what does it signify? Two words: entrepreneurship and incentives.

And no more anonymity for the ink-stained scribes in our proto-modern building.  But more important, we're taking on the "future of global journalism." Welcome words here at Trans/missions. Religion needs to be in that mix, and so far it's been MIA.

Look/see for yourself. Journalism is awash with new experiments, but few actively engage institutional religion or its role in politics and culture. Even fewer examine ethical issues or the questions of meaning and ultimacy that are commonly referred to as spirituality. Whether it's non-profit news, micro-news, news for hire, citizen journalism, collaborative journalism, student news, specialized news or amalgams, there's little attention to the impact of religion on institutions and individuals. (And if there is, it's implicit. Case in point: Facebook's happiness index has the potential to be news, create news and subvert news. I don't find that particularly happy-making, but I do consider it a pseudo-religious social experiment.)

With newspapers cutting religion beats along with other specialty reporting, there's a lot less time and money spent on investigative, in-depth and complex stories. That's why we need to promote entrepreneurial journalism as well as to incentivize those working on related topics. Some of this is already being done at sites like ProPublica or the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Journalism.  But I don't see investigations into the financial trails of religious NGOs or the religious aspect of global resistance movements or even a look at the sexual politics of the American Congress. A cursory examination of the Pulitzer site might lead to the conclusion that religion plays almost no role in worldwide crises. Really? Even Daniel Brooks' fascinating story on Mohammed Atta, "The Architect of 9/11," marginalized the role of religion even as it wrote around it.

What to do? One of the web's great gifts is its capaciousness: Let's use it to expand and enhance coverage. Straightforward narratives can be pushed out with video, audio and slide shows. Duke Helfand's Los Angeles Times story on Southern California mega-churches benefitted from photographs, but it would have been even better with video that captured the congregations' vitality and the passion of their members. The same strategy can work for alternative news sites if reporters and editors understand that religion is more than a Saturday or Sunday thing. It reminds me of the Zen tale about the little fish that swims up to the Fish Queen and asks, "What's this great ocean I keep hearing about?" Religion is like that.
 
There's talk of creating specialty sites that focus on religion in the same way the Pulitzer goes after crisis reporting or that KHN, the new Kaiser Health News, bores down on health-related issues. Those may be needed, but I'm more for mainstreaming. We can accomplish that by educating reporters about the importance of religion, teaching them to integrate it into their entreprenuerial repertoire and finding ways to incentivize our vision of good reporting.

Religion is central to news and should not be in a ghetto. Here at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, where we can almost see the ocean, it won't be.

Diane Winston