Death is a moment when the world, through its journalism, has traditionally asked the question, as perhaps never before, "Who was this person — really?"

It's an interesting ritual — and an important one — for journalists. News media are devoted to the events that shape our lives — change, disruption, expansion, depletion.

Journalists have been called watchdogs, and when doing their job well, they are. For the journalist in our society is charged with answering the question each of us needs answered as the sun rises (or before it sets): "Am I safe today?"

For the journalist then, death, in some ways, is more important than birth. For it is at death that we as a people pause — for however brief a moment — and take account of what has been, of who has been. And in Western society, we move at a pace so fast as to forget to take the pause that reflects. Death is a natural pause, a breathing in when someone's last breath has gone away.

For some journalists, the question and answers behind the obituary are so enormous that selected staff are assigned the task of preparation — a journalistic version of the Pharaohs' pyramid preparations. Motion begins early, carving and laying stone-by-stone the edifice that will memorialize a man or woman. The words must be right, the research must be thorough. There was a time when obituaries for the great in Western society were an Art, a feature story genre reserved for the best writers.

Nigel Stark in the August, 2005 edition of Journalism Studies, says obituaries are making a comeback in the media of the U.S., Britain and Australia. Begun in 17th century England, they were a kind of in-depth literature in the 1700s, but fell into disfavor through the 1800s and into the 20th century. Yet even in the last generations, obituaries for the most well-known were a kind of artistic history — biography aimed at moments of tribute.

In such obituaries, the greatness of the person determined how early the preparation begins. Obituary spreads are a study in elaborate biography for men such as Winston Churchill, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Pope Paul II, and for women such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Mother Teresa.

But obituaries are a limited outlet.

They are subject to the myopia of journalism that forgets the past or hasn't kept faith with the present. (Perhaps this is why, in the last few decades, the memoir has become such a staple of American book publishing. Those with access to a publisher — and such became amazingly simple with the advent of desktop publishing — tell their own life story and we snap these accounts up with a devotedness that's no less than astounding.)

One group that's been too long neglected in news coverage is Christians. Obituaries stand as one symptom of this larger problem in journalism. Obituaries for Christians — even when those Christians are women or men of some note, are too often badly done. Perhaps this is because for many news media outlets, the obituary draws on what used to be known as "clip files" — the collected reporting on a given person.

Christians don't make the news as often as they did before the 1920s. There are complicated reasons for that.

But an example of the phenomenon of neglected coverage of Christians is Clyde Cook, president of Biola University for 25 years beginning in 1982, who died in mid-April shortly after returning from a trip to do a funeral for a Biola alum. His death in his home in Fullerton, California was a moment that in many ways caused Christians across the world to pause in shock. Suddenly, a man they'd relied on for quiet example and leadership was gone.

Editors and journalism faculty are proverbial in their whacking off the word "suddenly" in any new writer's use of the word beside reference to death. Death, grumps the editor, is always sudden.

But we're drawn to the word because the cessation of life is so enormous — so final. We wish we'd had more warning. And in even cases where we've watched someone's life ebb away slowly, the end is still, well, sudden. There's a resonance — an echoing that makes us stop and collect ourselves.

The Los Angeles Times' obituary of Dr. Clyde Cook appeared Saturday morning, April 19 — the day people were departing airplanes in L.A. and pulling into Southern California freeways toward Fullerton and that city's First Evangelical Free Church. Clyde Cook had attended there. I remember. I'd been a visitor one Sunday as a potential hire at Biola to teach Journalism. Someone told me this was his church home. As I ventured into the lobby after the service, someone walked me up to him and introduced me. I'd be meeting with him the next day for the formal interview of a potential faculty member. He greeted me with a firm handshake and encouraged me to consider attending this church. He got a visitor's CD for me off a table and, with those deep blue eyes, encouraged me to feel welcome. It was almost deft, an "aw shucks" kind of moment. I'd known them in Georgia and in Kentucky. And here I was in California feeling it again. But in the Deep South, "aw shucks" could feel empty when it was over. Not with this man. He was there with you in ways few others were; yet he was the kind of leader who had a mind and soul capable of encompassing major portions of the planet.

It was that nuance in Clyde Cook that the L.A. Times missed. The obit, written by Valerie J. Nelson, hit on the usual topics: millions of dollars in endowment raised, thousands more students in the university enrolled, a revamping of the board of trustees and faculty to allow more women in leadership. He had taken steps to bring more ethnic diversity to the campus. He had signed off on change to the university's rules to allow social dancing off-campus by students.

But all of that was not Clyde Cook. It was part of the story, but not all.

What became interesting in this moment of death and reflection was how the Internet became a kind of echo chamber for this man's passing. Where the mainstream journalists lapsed, non-news writers stepped up and provided glimpses of the real story.

Editors of the Chimes Online, the Biola Web publication run by students, got verification of Clyde Cook's death in the hours after his passing and launched a blog soliciting the stories of those who knew loved the man. The outpouring was more than they'd expected.

And the university took notice, cooperating with the student media and furthering the discussion that was erupting all over the world, landing on the computer screens of those who knew him, those who wished they'd known him better, those who loved him.

Perhaps this is as it should be.

Journalists begin the discussion, James Carey once said, and from there, the conversation continues.

Perhaps the future of obituaries — and of all journalism — will be a hearkening back to a time when we gathered in public places and traded stories of one who is gone. On the Internet, we can gather from across space and culture; in that large space, journalism becomes only part of the larger moment that is communication of minds, hearts and souls.