Want to see inside the mind of a reporter?

Sounds scary — but this is actually fascinating and fruitful.

Boston Globe reporter Michael Paulson covers one of the bigger beats in Beantown, religion, and he’s just launched a blog at the paper dubbed Articles of Faith.

He posted an item recently about covering the (use fingers to make air quotes here) ordination (air quotes again) of women as priests:

A story I wrote last week, reporting that a group called Roman Catholic Womenpriests was holding a ceremony at which it planned to declare three women to be ordained Catholic priests, caused a bit of a firestorm because of the headline, which said “3 women to be ordained Catholic priests in Boston.’’ The headline – which I did not write or see before publication — was paired in the paper with a subordinate headline that said “Excommunication automatic, church warns,’’ but the construction proved problematic when readers, particularly on-line, saw the main headline as a legitimation of a ceremony that the Catholic Church says is invalid. The criticism, as happens these days, rippled through the blogosphere, and I got quite a bit of very angry e-mail.

We ran a clarification; I posted much of the e-mail I received; and I personally wrote to everyone who e-mailed. Then, when the actual ceremony took place, I filed a breaking news story to the web, that ran under the headline, “Group claims to ordain women priests in unsanctioned ceremony,’’ and a slightly different version for the Monday morning paper, which ran with the headline “Dissident group claims three women ordained as priests’’ (in an early edition, the word “upstart” was used in place of “dissident.”) The Globe tried, in those headlines, to reflect the debate over what was taking place.

The language I used in the stories also changed somewhat. I’ve been at this a long time, and I knew the subject of women’s ordination is a bit of a minefield, so in the first story I avoided using the word “Mass,’’ or the titles “Rev.” or “Bishop” in front of a woman’s name, knowing that those terms would be debated. The story was very clear that the Catholic Church viewed the ceremony as invalid, and the women as excommunicated; it quoted from the Archdiocese of Boston, and Pope John Paul II, and I thought it was quite clear and fair. I did call the event an “ordination ceremony’’ – my reasoning was that there are lots of such events in Christendom and beyond that are not sanctioned by Rome, some by Catholics not in union with Rome, and some by non-Catholics, and it seemed to me that the standard practice of newspapers is to honor the language used by religious groups. When an evangelical church declares someone ordained as a pastor, we say that person was ordained as a pastor; we don’t conduct an examination of his or her theological training, and we don’t ask who else would recognize this person as ordained.

But the reaction suggests that many readers didn’t read the story the same way I did, especially once they had seen the problematic headline, and so I decided to rethink the use of a few words – especially “ordain” and “ordination” – in the story about the actual event. In the end I decided to use the word “ceremony” rather than “ordination” to describe what was taking place, unless it was attributed to someone, and to attribute every description that I thought might be contested. That resulted, most awkwardly, in this phrase, “They then helped preside over a service at which they declared bread and wine to be consecrated and offered what they called Communion to anyone who wished to receive it.”

The coverage of the Sunday event has generated another round of e-mail which I am posting below. Much of it acknowledges the effort at greater precision, but some of it criticizes me – or the headline writer — for going too far in the other direction. Some of it comments on the vitriolic tone of the discussion. And a blogging priest who has been subjecting my coverage to Talmudic scrutiny offered a line-by-line analysis of the evolving coverage, concluding that the second story was better than the first. (Thanks!)

A few lessons I take from this episode:

– A traditional journalistic device for communicating more information about a story, the “subhed,’’ does not translate to the Internet. The initial story had a subordinate headline, or subhed, that made clear the church’s view of the ceremony, but even on Boston.com that subhed was dropped on many pages, and as the story migrated through the blogosphere, the story was referred to only by the main headline, which was, at best, disputable.

– Another journalist convention, “play,’’ is also irrelevant in cyberspace. As I explained to some readers, if the Catholic Church had decided to ordain women, that would be a huge front page story. The stories about the ceremony this weekend ran at the bottom of page B1 – a signal, in our view, that the matter was interesting and newsworthy, but not huge. But, of course, in cyberspace those distinctions, which we at newspapers spend a lot of time thinking about, are obliterated.

Some people asked me why we covered the story at all. Several of the e-mailers said they saw no distinction between the ceremony at the Church of the Covenant, and any individual who just declared himself or herself to be the president or the governor. This was my response to one of those readers: “The rationale for coverage is that this is the major group involved in a subject of high public interest and with at least some claim to, or argument for, legitimacy, which is why the Vatican and the various dioceses have responded, which Beacon Hill etc. would not do if your friends swear you in as governor. The e-mails I got make clear that there is a group out there that wishes we would simply not acknowledge that this group exists or is having this event, but that would be an editorial judgment as well, one that many people would view as censorial. I suppose each of our readers, given the options of all that takes place in Boston and the world each day, would put together a different set of stories if they were in charge of the newspaper, and all I can tell you is that we are making the best judgments we can, hour after hour and day after day, trying to decide what is important, significant, interesting, and trying to cover those events and issues in a way that reflects what is happening fairly and precisely.”

This looks like a blog worth following. And Paulson deserves props for letting us in on the process and letting the world know what’s he learned — and what he’s learning.

H/T to GetReligion.