Atheist Bibles-For-Porn Swap Riles Campus!

Click, click, click. Clicking on a link like the one above is the natural reaction to seeing a headline about pornography being exchanged for religious texts. But after a moment's reflection, you may wonder why a publicity stunt by a college atheist group would be considered newsworthy since only ten spiritual texts were traded for porn at the mid-sized Texas university where the group is based.

When the story broke last Tuesday, online news outlets and blogs picked it up in droves. (And posters on comment boards followed--and fanned--the flames.) It appeared on the front page of the Google news aggregator, and new posts about the event continued throughout the week. There was even a post in the Argentina Star. Who knew that folks in Argentina cared about goings-on at the University of Texas in San Antonio?

So why did the event generate so much online energy? And was it news?

UTSA's Atheist Agenda started its "smut for smut" campaign in 2005, when the group formed. New media outlets loved the story even more then. The group's president was flooded with interview requests, including an invitation to debate MSNBC's Tucker Carlson.

So this news isn't even new. But it caused a stir, again, just the same.

Of course, the reason for the online life of the story is obvious: it's an "eyeball catcher," a "click magnet" if you will. And that's exactly the reason Atheist Agenda pulled the stunt--cheap and easy outrage, by the group's own admission, enabled it to spark heated debate on the topic of religion.

In that sense, the demonstration worked out beautifully. Not only was controversy stirred on the UTSA campus, but web-news stories and blog posts generated hundreds of comments in almost every instance. The threads of the online narratives ranged from an affirmation of faith in reaction to the story to atheists both praising and condemning the aims of Atheist Agenda's campaign.

On several news sites there were also op-ed pieces either supporting or lamenting the group's trickster-like tweaking of cultural tensions. But in an interesting twist, most mainstream media did not pick up this story.

So is this another example of the lively fragmentation of new media vs. the stodgy coherence old media? Is "clickability" really becoming more important than the traditional standards of newsworthiness?

And what does this say about the religious sensibilities and sensitivities of online news media? If things were the other way around--if a church were giving out Bibles in exchange for porn--would that be news?

The two main points in most of the online stories were that some Christian groups protested the event by gathering and reading their Bibles and that UTSA officials hastened to assure people who were offended that Atheist Agenda was doing nothing illegal.

Which brings me back to the question: Is this news or is it just a clickable story?

In moving forward, as new-media journalism distinguishes itself from the old, this will continue to be a question of extreme importance. Is the quality of content suffering for the quantity of the clicks? More specifically, does the quest for clickability mean that stories about religion will inevitably be pigeonholed in the tired and distracting narrative of  "us vs. them" or "them vs. us"?

I hope not. That would mean that the more we click, the less we actually know.

Kim Daniels is pursuing an M.A. in broadcast journalism at USC Annenberg.