media maven / By Marcy Burstiner

The Faithless Pages

(Oct. 4, 2007)  This was how the Times-Standard began a story about the Jewish New Year known as Rosh Hashanah: “The blast of the ram’s horn marks the end to the summer season. Jewish people around the world are roused by the piercing sound of this ancient instrument known as the shofar. The sound of the shofar announces the beginning of the Jewish New Year 5764.”

But we are now in the year 5768. The paper didn’t make a mistake. I’m quoting from last time the Times-Standard ran a story about Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur, the single most important time of the year for Jews. That was in 2003.

It wouldn’t be so egregious an oversight, even though some 80 papers around California ran Rosh Hashanah stories this year, except that every week the Times-Standarddevotes two whole pages to religion: Its “Faith” section. The U.S. Census doesn’t count religious affiliation, so it’s hard to know how many Jews there are in Humboldt County. But I counted seven Steins and six Goldbergs in the phone book, and those are just the ones listed.

But this column isn’t about slighting Jews. I haven’t been to a service in seven years, I spent Yom Kippur eating falafel at the North County Fair and I spent last Saturday at a Pig Pickin’ in Trinidad. It’s about how you measure the quality of a newspaper by the quality of its throwaway pages — the sections most people toss without reading. This is where they used to stick “women’s” news.

In 1989, I moved into a Midwestern town of 300 people. When I went to the town hall to get my water turned on the pleasant clerk handed me a list of the town’s 11 churches. When I moved my furniture into my rented duplex, the kindly man across the street invited me into his living room to play me an album his musician son had just recorded. It was gospel music, and he blasted out of speakers almost as tall as I was.

The world is now more religious than it was back then. The Humboldt County Yellow Pages has local church listings under 50 different categories. There’s a thriving Mormon population and a large number of Seventh Day Adventists. At a time when newspapers struggle to keep their circulation base and latch onto the new buzz word — “hyper-local” — I can’t fathom why our local papers do such a lousy job of covering the one thing most people care deeply about.

What’s on the Faith pages? Generally one photo profile of a church — a large photo or two over a a long caption that tells you where the church is located, who the pastor, priest, reverend or rabbi is, when services are held and whether it has bible study sessions and children’s programs. It also tends to give you a snippet of church history. And there’s one column each week written by a local religious leader. Then there are two much larger wire stories about some religious conflict from across the country and a bunch of briefs — some national, off the wires, and some local, off press releases.

In the 20 issues I scanned, there wasn’t a single story with original reporting. And that’s too bad, because the pages hinted at good stories. Did you know that Cindy Storrs replaced Kate O’Leary as reverend of the Arcata United Methodist Church? How’s that affecting the church? Or that the St. Innocent Orthodox church in Eureka has “acclaimed” gyros? Who makes them? Or that Easter and Christmas services are so popular at the Hydesville Community Church — some 800 people attend — that they have to have it in the River Lodge in Fortuna? I wonder about David Besanceney, the youth pastor there, and the challenges he has shepherding children and teenagers in such a rural outpost, where methamphetamines and marijuana are prevalent and immigration and the collapse of the lumber economy has transformed the community.

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