To better serve an ever more-interested audience, reporters covering religious topics should avoid journalism’s traditional "conflict" model and beware of generalizations.

Speakers offered that advice this week at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism, adding that readers appreciate nuanced coverage of faith and spiritual issues.

Boston Globe religion reporter Michael Paulson, part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team that uncovered sexual abuse by Catholic clergy, has found people "open to having an emotional experience" from long-form newspaper stories. One example: his 18,000-word series on a neighborhood church that showed what he called "the drama of ordinary life."

He said the nationwide media focus on church scandals, along with 9/11 and its aftermath, has made religious coverage "more focused" and encouraged reporters to treat spiritual institutions with the skepticism they give other powerful subjects.

Benjamin Hubbard, chair emeritus of comparative religion at California State University, Fullerton, and a blogger for The Orange County Register, noted that religion, values and spirituality permeate a range of important topics, including abortion rights, AIDS in Africa and the Iraq war.

So "it’s more and more important for reporters to be religiously literate," he said. Hubbard sees religious coverage improving but said the media tend to adapt  “conflict” models and present some clerics’ unguarded comments out of context.

Debra Mason, executive director of the Religion Newswriters Association and director of the Center on Religion & the Professions at the University of Missouri, Columbia, also criticized "conflict framing" and said many reporters fail to capture the complexity of faith.

She said reporters covering religion should remember, "You’re never an expert," be aware of their own biases and have a respectful attitude. "You can ask tough questions," she said, but argued that journalists should not try "to prove or disprove a faith."

She and other speakers noted blogs' increasingly important role as newspapers shrink staffs and news holes. As an example, she praised "Whispers in the Loggia," run by a 20-something Rocco Palma, who uses confidential, multiple sources to break important stories out of the secretive Vatican. Another blog she mentioned, Andrea Useem's ReligionWriter.com, presents "Fresh Ideas on Religion in Whole-Grain Journalism Form."

Mason said the press has failed most in the areas of evangelicals and Islam.  And Munir Shaikh, executive director of the Institute on Religion and Civic Values, formerly called the Council on Islamic Education stressed the need not to generalize.

He sees references to the "Muslim or Islamic "world," but notes that there’s no separate "world" and that this tends to homogenize a diverse peoples and views. Instead, he said. journalists should be specific, identifying for example a country in which there is a majority of Muslims.

Shaikh identified other easily misused terms. He said "jihad," often translated as "holy war," actually means "striving for the sake of God" and that "Radical" or "Islamist" labels are as much of a generalization as "Moderate."

But he ended by praising the media’s shift from portraying American Muslims as "exotic" to showing them as part of a culturally diverse nation.