Other times, other voices : Medium, message and mission in Thought for the Week

The religious column in British local newspapers is today caught in the strained relationship between religion and the media, and may have to struggle for its survival in a cultural environment which has come to call its relevance into question. In this sense, it can today be studied as an illustration of the way in which a text genre reflects a community's values and world-views. In the case example studied, a shift in "voice", authorship and content of the religious column in the Isle of Thanet Gazette (2004-2005) illustrates how style and structure of a genre can be meaningfully correlated with extra-textual conditions (production, reception and interpretation) as well as social and institutional constraints : the demands of a medium conditioned by editorial policy; the editors' convictions and preferences; the paper's perception of readers' expectations and responses; an ideological climate in which talk of religion is no longer universally accepted; a theological debate between transcendent and immanent representations of the divine; and the conventions of a medium with its its own voice, which may take religious discourse into the realm of popular semi-tabloid communication.