I haven't spent substantial time in London in several years, and, frankly, I generally feel little pull to revisit.
But I would have liked being there earlier this week to attend what promised to be an interesting talk by a leading British investigative journalist on how his knowledge of religion – Islam in particular – helped in his reporting a crime story that officials were loathe to explore too closely for fear they'd be accused of religious or racial bias.
I'm referring to a talk by Andrew Norfolk of The Times, the Murdoch-owned weekday daily, organized by Lapido Media, the online arm of the London-based Centre for Religious Literacy in Journalism.
Norfolk was interviewed by Lapido for a piece published in advance of his talk. During the interview, he spoke about how his knowledge of South Asian Islamic culture in Great Britain enabled him to uncover what Lapido called "the grooming of teenage white girls by gangs of Asian men – and the blind eye turned by the local council and police force."
(At the Monday night event, Lapido also launched what it called – incorrectly – the "first guide in the world to religious literacy for media professionals." I say incorrectly because on this side of the pond journalists have long been able to profit from the similar work of the Religion News Association, to which I belong. Not that Lapido's effort, Religious Literacy: An Introduction, isn't a welcome contribution. I mean, our own tmatt wrote the last chapter.)
Norfolk's work on the gangs story led to his being named 2014 Journalist of the Year by the British Journalism Awards, the organization that doles out such accolades in the U.K.
Here's the top of Lapido's advance story.
ANDREW Norfolk remembers the time when mentioning religion at work was so taboo that ‘it was as if you had burped at a party’.
That was in a regional newsroom in the 1990s.
