We complain a lot about the dearth of full-time religion writers here in the USA, but our situation is positively lush compared to our neighbor to the north.

Whereas Canadian religion reporters once featured the likes of Tom Harpur, Doug Todd, Bob Harvey., Gordon Legge and Harvey Sheppard, Todd now does religion plus a bunch of other beats. Other professionals have moved on, retired or died.

In the crunch that is today’s print newspaper world, dozens of religion writers have either been laid off or transferred to other beats. A younger generation of reporters, mainly Gen X’ers, never got to work full time because the beat was crashing in major regional newspapers from coast to coast just as they were coming into their prime.

But one newspaper: the Winnipeg Free Press, has a full faith page with local religion news. The reason?

Viewers are paying for it.

I want to draw your attention to a column (in J-source; the online publication for the Canadian Journalism Project) by Free Press religion freelancer John Longhurst, who explained how the Godbeat has appeared in the Winnipeg paper.

(A story about a local Catholic priest) is an example of the new approach the Free Press is taking to religion coverage, in a unique year-long pilot project in partnership with the city’s faith groups.
As editor Paul Samyn put it in a note to readers on March 2 when the project was launched: “Over the past nine months we’ve been on a mission, meeting with various members of the city’s faith groups to gauge their willingness to help fund the journalism we produce. The offer was simple: if you value faith coverage in your newspaper and you want to see more — help us do more.”
The faith community responded, contributing just over $30,000 to fund additional freelance writing by the Free Press’s two regular religion writers, along with other contributors.

I’ve never read The Handmaid’s Tale but I could not miss the recent PR blitz about the Hulu version that has been running on TV nor the fact that the wait list for borrowing the book is in the hundreds (at least in Seattle’s King County library system).

I’m not sure how long Hulu has been developing the series, but the timing couldn’t have been better for folks who feel that this is how the country will end up if Donald Trump has his way. Looking at trends in modern America, many still see our nation poised to become a theocracy.

Published in 1985 during the Ronald Reagan administration, the book was the Hunger Games of the 1980s; a description of a dystopian universe in a future post-cataclysmic America. For those who think this is just a TV series, with zero impact on the news, take a look at this June 13 piece that ran in The Cleveland Plain-Dealer:

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Sixteen women dressed as handmaids from the novel and TV series "The Handmaid's Tale" walked the halls of the Ohio Statehouse on Tuesday to protest an bill that would restrict abortion here.

The women donned red robes and white bonnets and sat in silence as the Senate Judiciary Committee heard initial testimony on Senate Bill 145.

"The Handmaid's Tale," a Margaret Atwood novel turned Hulu series, takes place in a not-so-distant future where the United States. has become a totalitarian society led by men and plagued by infertility. To solve that problem, child-bearing women are forced to become "handmaids" and birth babies fathered by men leading the regime.

"The handmaids are forced to give birth and, in so many cases, because of all the restrictions on abortion access, women in Ohio and across the country are being forced to give birth," Jaime Miracle, deputy director of NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio said.

The article did have one reference to an opponent who felt demonstrators “were making a mockery "of the issue, but that was way down in the article.

Want religion coverage in Winnipeg? Readers need to be prepared to pay for it

Hey reporters and critics: Please add a dose of reality to coverage of The Handmaid's Tale