It is that time of year again when I’m listening to Lutheran Public Radio’s Christmas music, lighting candles for Hanukkah (wanted to teach the kiddo what that is all about) and reflecting on the end of the year. This year is different in that my nearly five-year stint with GetReligion comes to an end with this post.

You may have already seen tmatt’s writing on the changes afoot and while much is still up in the air, funding is tight, so the odds are good that I will not be writing here as much as in the past.

I have been writing three times a week, of course, and I’ll miss the constant emphasis on breaking news — of which there’s been plenty over this weekend, all of it sad, unfortunately.

Not only were people stabbed at an innocent Hanukkah celebration Saturday night at a rabbi’s house just outside of New York but two people were killed Sunday at a Fort Worth church by a gunman who killed two churchgoers before security shot him dead. Our own Bobby Ross wrote this about the Texas carnage.

One weird factoid concerned the first attacker’s weapon. He was using a sword (or very long knife) instead of a gun. What was up about that? And why have many of the recent attacks against Jews been carried out by blacks? This Jerusalem Post editorial explains why black anti-Semitism is the new boogyman that no one wants to name.

About the shootings in Texas, what if the attack had taken place in a zip code where people -– in this case the security team at the church — aren’t as likely to carry guns? Would there be a lot more dead? And why that church?

I’ve been asking such questions for four years and 10 months now. I was teaching journalism in Fairbanks and the snow was still deep on the ground in February 2015 when tmatt asked if I’d join the team on March 1. I’d never blogged professionally before, so it was a steep learning curve figuring out the intricacies of Squarespace, how to attract readers and how to operate while four time zones behind the other writers. I am grateful that tmatt burnished off a lot of the rough pieces in my copy, especially when I was frequently up past midnight doing posts. One gets the late-breaking news when posting from Alaska.

Now I am merely three zones behind most of the GetReligion team, with whom it’s been a pleasure to work with and compare notes and observations of America and the world’s wild and crazy religion scene. Reporting is often such a lonely occupation, so I have really enjoyed the camaraderie.

My daughter and I now live in the Seattle area and one of my assignments was to monitor religion coverage west of the Rockies which, unfortunately, is as sparse as ever.

Soon after I started, the Oregonian got a religion reporter. She has since left; the Los Angeles Times continues to refuse to hire a religion reporter (despite southern California being home to what may be the world’s most diverse religious population) and the Vancouver (BC) Sun religion writer has diversified into other beats. Salt Lake City probably has the most religion writers west of the Rockies, but Spokane has equally robust religion coverage thanks to Tracy Simmons’ SpokaneFavs site.

I’ve learned that one secret to getting hits is to find a group (Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Catholics) to whom a story really matters that no one is covering very much. Then stake out a claim on said story by having a definite opinion and sticking to it. I have been more the “bad cop” on the GR team in terms of media criticism as I realized that people appreciated us taking on the laggards in our field whose reporting on religion is dishonest and unfair.

I also read local publications and alternative religion media for ideas that were guaranteed to engage folks. For instance, the whole drag-queens-in-public-libraries scene, which I wrote about here and then here ,has been a consistent winner in the most-clicked posts category.

What else did readers like this year? I went back to the weeks where my posts got the most clicks –- for the record, that was 32% of the 52 weeks there were GetReligion posts in 2019 –- and this post about the Oregonian messing up coverage of a conservative black priest taking on his own liberal white parishioners in Portland was the most-clicked on for three weeks straight.

My May 17 post about journalists asking the right questions about a Catholic student gunned down in Colorado was GetReligion’s second-most popular post of the year. It was a story that lots of media were ignoring and so when people began searching about for something, anything, about this student, they clicked on my commentary.

Kurdish evangelicals, clueless NPR editors who talked about babies not being babies until they’re born and Beth Moore’s never-ending fight with conservative guys who just want her to go home and bake cookies; all of these topics were real hits with readers and it was fun writing about them. The more outrageous the topic, the more readers I got.

My most fun post was reporting from Mongolia in mid-July about correspondence between the medieval popes and the Mongol khans in the 13th century. Didn’t get a lot of clicks on that one but it was great trip and that’s me about 30 miles outside of Ulaanbaatar balancing a very heavy Mongolian eagle in the photo atop this post.

One thing I’ll really miss is our coverage of the religion journalism scene and the menagerie of reporters who are part of this queen of all beats. We’ve done quite a bit on who’s won what awards, the never-ending drama at Religion News Service and behind-the-scenes machinations at the annual Religion Newswriters convention. There were people out there who appreciated our watchdog function, as no one else was doing it.

What will I be doing? I am really interested in the Arctic (teaching in Alaska will do it to you) and I’m looking to develop a religion-in-the-Arctic beat that will depend heavily on whether I can (1) get to that part of the world and (2) find outlets that will publish my work. I have lots of story ideas in that region but the airfare to, say, Greenland, is out of sight. I’m also interested in anything to do with the Silk Road; the route that Chinese evangelicals are using as their way to spread Christianity back to Jerusalem. And I want to follow trends among Pentecostals and charismatics, which I see as the most inventive religious group out there. I’m one of few journalists who knows anything in depth about them. We’re hoping that some of this takes place here at GetReligion.

I’ve been writing for our sister website, Religion Unplugged, throughout 2019 and I’ve a new piece on the Barbary pirates’ 1627 raid on Iceland coming out there soon. I also have pieces in ForeignPolicy.com, Image Journal and the Seattle Times due out next month. I still remain on the Washington Post Talent Network for the occasional Seattle story plus I’ve got two book manuscripts that I need to get out the door. I’ll be posting my stuff on Facebook and Twitter.

So I’ll be around, folks. Come along for the next part of my journey.