“There is a lot going on with sex and sexuality in our culture now that is not being documented in mainstream newspapers,” said Kelly McBride, ethics group leader at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Fla. “We have essentially ‘pornographied’ our culture without even paying attention to it.”

From Internet dating to the sexual development of children, she encouraged more than 50 journalists at the 59th annual American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors’ convention to stop demonizing sex and to start writing about it.

“Our job is to name and describe behaviors,” McBride said. “Our job is to tell our society what’s going on, and I think we have a couple of inhibitions when it comes to this particular topic. As a result of that, we just ignore it or we cover it in some very specific ways that would lead you, as a news consumer, to completely erroneous conclusions about what’s going on in sex and sexuality in American culture.”

Her own unscientific analysis of seven U.S. daily newspapers showed that many of the stories with references to sex had nothing to do with real people.

“If you were to try and figure out the roles sex and sexuality plays in our culture what you would conclude is that the mainstream media is really concerned only with sex lives of fictional characters and criminals when we know that’s not true,” McBride said.

Pornography, for example, would not be a billion-dollar industry if it was true, she said.

“Go ask the people at the front desk what the No. 1 downloaded category of movies is in this hotel or in any hotel in the country,” McBride said. “I think we should be covering porn because a lot of very responsible, normal people consume porn.”

Including newspaper subscribers.

“I don’t think there’s a community in this country that doesn’t have an adult dancing establishment,” she said. “And if you look at the clients of that establishment you will find your readers there.” Or your colleagues.

“There are people in this room who consume pornography,” McBride said. “There are people in your newsrooms who consume pornography. To acknowledge that in the newspaper would shock some people, but it would also provide authenticity to the work you’re doing.”

Creating a sex beat won’t be easy, she said.

“You have to find a good journalist to do it,” McBride said, citing the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as an example.

The AJC has a sex beat writer. “A good journalist has to be able to separate his or her own personal opinions from the work.”

Mainstreaming sex may also mean alienating some readers as Rochelle Reed, convention attendee and features editor at the San Luis Obispo (Calif.) Tribune, learned. When she did a story two years ago about people who left their heterosexual marriages to form homosexual relationships, eight readers canceled their subscriptions (However, the paper gained six subscribers).

Newspapers have to be bold enough to take that risk, McBride said.

“If we allow our loudest critics to dictate what we cover,” she said, “we will write ourselves into obsolescence.”

-Rodney Thrash is a features reporter at the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times.