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Jay Rosen, author of What Are Journalists For and point man for the public journalism movement, has helped found The Revealer, a daily weblog on religion and the press at www.therevealer.org. His debut essay suggests eight ways journalism functions as a religion or a priesthood. He makes some playful but apt analogies, including journalism schools as seminaries, reporters' righteous indignation at "the sin of religious certainty," the First Amendment and other creeds reporters hold dear, and public journalism as a breakaway church calling for repentance. But he ignores the question of how other institutions justify similar parallels; much of what he says could apply to Fortune 500 companies, politicians, the military, environmentalists, basketball coaches, and so on. I suppose the difference (though Rosen doesn't say it) is that journalists do more pious introspection and hand-wringing over their Role in Democracy and Duty to the Public.

The Revealer amplifies discussion of how religion is covered in the mainstream media, and carries on relevant conversations—including one about Celebration, Florida, (see Places below) as an Eden. While even more time could be spent dealing with the daily distortions of religious topics in the media (all too common, as Christian Smith writes in the current B&C, a column that was reprinted at The Revealer), you have to appreciate intelligent references to Pascal's Wager and the Mars Hill Review in the same blog. That and more make The Revealer worth a bookmark.

Related:
The Tribune Tower as a cathedral of journalism, from my Chicago album From the Indianapolis Star: Editors worry about reporter ignorance, too—when story is about them
Earlier:
Christians in newsrooms
'Bright' belief as a religion

From the New York Times :

International Falls, Minn., hangs like a stalactite from the Canadian border, and [its] "Ice Box Days XXIV" … is a celebration of its idiosyncratic fame. … Not so fast, says Roland Fowler, a 64-year-old former Army mule skinner, or driver, who lives 120 miles away in Embarrass, Minn., a hamlet with 640 people, just one gas station and no visitor accommodations. "There's no way International Falls can keep up with us," he said earlier this week, when the thermometer outside his farmhouse recorded a low of minus 25 and a high of minus 14. "Even in July we've had garden-killing frosts." For two decades, Mr. Fowler has argued that International Falls has been dining out on its status as America's "Ice Station Zebra" for too long. Way too long. On Feb. 8, 1982, Embarrass hit 52 below on an unofficial thermometer that shattered while the mercury was still headed south. But it wasn't until eight years ago that Embarrass, honoring trademark laws, started billing itself with a less poetic, but more straightforward slogan: "The Nation's Cold Spot."

CELEBRATION, Fla. — The gossip along this town's determinedly quaint main drag these days is bigger than the typical "who left their trash can by the curb," or even "who added on to their house without permission." The Walt Disney Company, which built Celebration just outside the Walt Disney World gates in the 1990's and has been the planned community's benefactor and strict parent, put the town center on the market last June. The pastel-colored shops and restaurants that make up Celebration's signature squeaky-clean vista will soon change hands, and as a sale is negotiated in secret, residents and business owners are wondering who will take Disney's place. … Officials at Disney's development arm here, the Celebration Company, said they were negotiating with a potential buyer and hoped to announce a sale as soon as next week. They would not identify the buyer of the town center, which includes 16 retail shops, 6 restaurants, 105 apartments and 94,000 square feet of office space.

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