Pounding out a brand-new beat.

At first she was met with raised eyebrows in staff meetings, but Hillary Wacai, the religion-news correspondent for television station WKYT-TV in Lexington, Kentucky, has proven to newsroom cronies and the Lexington community alike that religion coverage rates high as a newsworthy and hard-hitting topic.

On October 24, 1994, WKYT, sensing the need for a full-time religion correspondent, made that leap of faith and hired Wacai, a recent graduate student from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism in Evanston, Illinois. Drawing from her strong journalistic skills, Wacai, although never having covered the religion beat, met the challenge head on.

As the new reporter on the block, where did you begin?

Well, here I was, a general-assignment reporter with a brand-new beat. I was really nervous at first. But I came to this as I would any assignment. You have to be enterprising and find out what is going on in that area. I spent the entire week before I started at the station by searching out as many of Lexington's different religious leaders and reading as much as I could. I'd start off telling them, "I'm going to be your religion reporter, and I want to know from you what would you like me to cover? What do you want to hear? What kind of stories have you been frustrated with?"

I was greeted warmly and with such a tremendous amount of enthusiasm. They gave me so many great ideas and stories that have grown into other pieces. By my first day at work I had three full pages of story ideas.

My gut reaction when I initially discussed taking the job was that this could be a fluffy beat, but then, talking it over with the news director, together we were able to come up with at least 20 hard-hitting news issues regarding religion - women in the church, religion and politics, and the changing faces of church leadership - stories that don't get a lot of press. I realized that there is a huge amount of untold stories out there.

What did you hit upon that first week?

I discovered what reporters love to report on: trends. Seminaries have been great places for stories because they are the training grounds for the religious leaders of tomorrow. Everyone's gearing up for the turn of the century, and I'm interested in how the churches and their leaders are preparing for it.

For example, there is an increasing number of older, career types entering seminaries - lawyers, managers, and other business people leaving established careers to enter the seminary.

What are some other stories you've covered?

I think the media are criticized for religion coverage because it seems like all we do are sex-scandal stories involving church leaders. But I actually got to cover the beginnings of the healing process.

Before I started in Lexington, a priest was convicted of sex-related crimes. During one of my regular check-up calls to the Catholic diocese office, the chancellor mentioned that she was working on a letter to all the parish priests. The letter asked them to include prayers of healing for sexual-abuse victims and invited them to a healing Mass the bishop was celebrating. The bishop was going to publicly apologize for the scandal. We led our newscast with it.

Another story was the last election in Kentucky, which made ground-breaking history - no one saw the upset coming. In Kentucky, it was the religious, right-wing conservatives - an incredibly politically active group - who really helped swing the vote. I was able to do an analysis piece on the group's effect on the election.

What's the commitment to religion reporting at your station?

When I first took the job, I was told that the station would like to see a story from me every day. That's a lot of work when you have to come up with stories on your own - which I do most of the time.

Do you have to be a person of faith to be a successful religion reporter?

Well, one thing you can't be is a person of cynicism. The whole thing you are reporting on is people's faith and their relationship to a god. Faith is the complete belief in something without concrete or scientific evidence. And if you approach these assignments with cynicism, it will come out in the tone of your reporting. These stories need to be told, not mocked. A lot of stories that I suggest in the newsroom are met with some skepticism by other newspeople, but then after the story is filed, these same newspeople will tell me what a great story it was.

Do the media miss the message?

Perhaps in the past, but I think that is changing. The New York Times, ABC News, National Public Radio (NPR), and "The McNeill Lehrer Report" all cover religion. While it still may not be in proportion to other human-interest stories, I think that it is definitely changing. Yes, a lot of the stories we hear are negative. But there are some very positive stories out there, and they're being covered by good reporters.