Some of my students are still hunting for crumbs. They want certainty, security, status and health insurance. Others are playing a whole new game. But they're out on a limb without a safety net, and it's my job as a mentor and professor to help create it.

(A new report, commissioned by Columbia's J-school, calls on foundations, philanthropists, the government and universities to help with the safety net.)

My net is held in place by the conviction that religion undergirds and enriches just about any story a good reporter might want to tell. It's a way to understand why individuals and societies make basic choices—justifying means to ends, judging right from wrong, joining hopeless causes and noble crusades. It's a key motivational factor that's often overlooked in our zeal to see the world in materialist terms.

I teach students to treat religion as a social dynamic, pairing it with politics, race, culture or economics. But once they master the analytic categories and the storytelling skills, they've got to get their work to the public. There are many places to post, but few pay (or pay much) for content. It's paradise for readers but an impossible model for a professional career.

The solution has to be top-down as well as bottom-up. We need to incentivize journalists to write creatively and analytically about important social dynamics, including religion. Anyone, but especially foundations and philanthropists aware of the need for reliable information to safeguard democratic society, should see the urgency of religion in the mix.

The object is not just to keep the spotlight on pedophile priests or church/state dilemmas. It's also to support and mainstream the kind of incisive and investigative work that Kathryn Joyce has done on religion and families, Bethany Moreton on religion and business and Dagmar Herzog on sex and the religious right. Whether packaged as travel stipends, reporting fellowships or living support, incentives ensure that in-depth reporting is sustained and expanded in the new media environment.

Reporters, too, need to accept a whole new level of responsibility. There's no time for griping at editors when you work online. Rather, you bend to the media's logic, re-branding, re-packaging and re-envisioning your work and yourself in ways that might seem antithetical to an older generation of journalists. We still teach the fundamentals of reporting and writing, but students can't, or shouldn't, graduate from j-school without taking a course (or at least learning some lessons) in entrepreneurship.

In the old media model, religion was typically overlooked, occasionally sensationalized and reliably turned over to the political reporters when something important occurred. In the new media model, religion should be just another one of those indispensable bits of data—like "why" and "so what"—that needs to be factored into every story.

We have the time, we have the space, now we need to create and cajole the resources to re-imagine journalism from the inside out.

Diane Winston