OREM, Utah -- Covering the LDS Church has unique challenges, according to a panel of reporters who spoke Thursday at the "Mormonism in the Public Mind" conference at Utah Valley University.

Jennifer Dobner from the Associated Press said she had a huge learning curve when she started covering The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints four and a half years ago. "Understanding Mormonism is not an easy thing. It's a complicated theology, and it's a complicated culture, and you can't understand one without the other," she said.

Salt Lake Tribune religion reporter Peggy Fletcher Stack said people often ask her if she is Mormon. She tells them that it is none of their business. "The reason I do that is because people want to find out if you are on their side or the other side," she said.

Lynn Arave, from the Deseret News, said that because the church owns the newspaper, church spokesmen take extra care to not appear biased toward it. "The church doesn't like to favor us, so most of the time, we are last on the priority list," he said.

Michael Paulson, who gave the keynote address earlier at the conference, is the religion reporter for The Boston Globe. He said he sees challenges developing industry-wide for the coverage of religion.

"The religion beat is in a contraction," Paulson said. "When I started this beat, the LA Times had four religion reporters. Now, they have one. The New York Times had three. Now, they have two. The Washington Post has dropped their reporter. The Dallas Morning News, which forever has had the most award-winning religion section in America, closed its religion section."

Paulson said there appears to be a shift from long-form journalism to shorter stories that are easier to read on the Internet. For example, the Associated Press is designing short 130-word stories specifically for delivery on cell phones and PDAs, according to Dobner. Stack and Arave also noted the daily writing pressures that prevent them from doing more and longer investigative stories.

With all its challenges, the panelists agreed that religion reporting has high points.

Dobner, for example, told of watching the late LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley pulling a pocket knife out of his pocket during an interview to show her how he played mumbly peg as a child -- flipping the knife off his head onto his desk.

"It was so classically (President) Hinckley, because he was unscripted. He was totally himself," she said.

The "Mormonism in the Public Mind" conference concludes Friday at Utah Valley University.

E-mail: mdegroote@desnews.com