How to be a Successful Religious Affairs Journalist

Whether you read The Guardian, The Telegraph, New Statesman or The Catholic Herald, you’re bound to stumble upon a hefty smattering of religious affairs journalism.

Whatever your belief, or lack of belief, chances are you enjoy keeping up to date with religious affairs. It may be to keep abreast of events within your own faith, or perhaps to just follow the farcical antics of other religions.

Regardless of your pre-existing viewpoint, you won’t have too much of a problem finding a piece of journalism that is conveniently tailored to your way of thinking. Indeed many recent news articles regarding the ordination of women bishops, catholic child abuse or legislation for gay marriage were spun to fit a particular point of view by the simple selection of the appropriate vernacular.

For those entrepreneurial journalists wishing to cover all bases and therefore maximize their reach, this could require rewriting each piece to tailor the language for each demographic.

In order to solve this problem I have customised the AutoCorrect feature in Microsoft Word to enable generic religious news stories to be either liberalised or conservatised to suit the target audience. The AutoCorrect function simply searches for predefined strings within the text and automatically replaces the string with the designated replacement string.

In order to liberalise your religious article, pull down the Tools menu in MS Word and select AutoCorrect. Then simply set up the function as shown in the screenshot below:

Alternatively, to conservatise your religious article, set up your AutoCorrect function thus: