Happy Wednesday friends,
The new year has started with a bit of a bang for us. To give you some idea of how things have ramped up here, last year we tried to aim for an average of about 10 solid news stories at The Pillar each week.
When you consider that The Pillar only has five people working here full-time, turning out 10 stories you can’t and won’t read anywhere else every week, while getting up multiple podcast episodes and moving the ball on our longer-term investigative work, makes for a pretty full week.
But in 2025, we’re averaging closer to 14 news items weekly, 7 per newsletter. That growth hasn’t been a conscious decision on our part, there’s just been a lot more news to break and unpack.
Whether we’re breaking new appointments to major archdioceses before they’re announced — and the how and why behind the appointment process — or breaking the suppression of entire religious communities, we’ve been doing our best to bring you today’s stories yesterday.
And when something unexpected happens, we’ve done our damndest to bring you actual, helpful, expert analysis of what is going on, not hot takes and click bait.
So when JD Vance argues that the bishops’ conference is counting cash off of illegal immigration, or the Freemasons put out a press release saying Joe Biden is now a member, you have something substantial and informed to read, so you can understand the context and make your own mind up about what’s going on.
We have not, and never will, take our eyes off the unpleasant but necessary work of bringing accountability and transparency to the sexual abuse crisis, where ever it is needed.
That’s what The Pillar is all about: doing the work, publishing real reporting, and adding real value to a story. From Day 1 our first editorial rule has been: if we can’t add real value, and if you can read the same coverage somewhere else, we won’t waste your time.
From what I can tell, you get that. Our reader numbers are through the roof. Thousands, but thousands of new people have signed up to get our newsletters in the last few weeks. It’s all hitting a level I frankly didn’t think possible when JD and I started this project with a pair of laptops and half an idea four years ago.
In fact, on the day The Pillar turned four earlier this month, the two of us were speaking at a conference about building and strengthening institutions in the Church and someone casually called The Pillar an "institution" of Catholic media.
It kind of shocked me for a minute. Catholics don’t tend to think of four year old “institutions” — we’re conditioned to think of such things being tried and tested over decades and centuries.
To the extent that we have gone from “upstart blog” to “institution” in very little time, I am still shocked, and obviously grateful. But here’s the thing: I don’t think of The Pillar as being either.
Properly understood, The Pillar is an experiment.
Over the last 25 years, the internet has unmade, remade, and unmade media over and again. In barely a blink, the whole business of journalism went from physical print publications and on-air broadcasting to everything online all at once, and for free. But the economics that fueled that sea change — ad based revenue feeding off of infinite clicks — cratered in on themselves pretty quickly.
That’s why over the last few years you’ve seen a lot of major news sites pivot back to a paywalled, paying subscribers-only model. Meanwhile, others stay free to read but have to lean hard either into attracting maximum eyeballs, by any means necessary, while slashing costs and personnel, or relying on big money “donations” from a small number of benefactors.
The experiment we set out to try with The Pillar was to be none of the above. Or, as some people put it to us, “the worst of both worlds.”
We want the work we do to be a service to the Church, so we don’t want to lock out priests, religious and Catholic families who genuinely can’t afford to pay for a subscription.
We never want to lean into the perverse incentives of paid-per-click ad revenue either. We’ve seen what it does to coverage and it isn’t good — it feeds on sensationalism, panders to a sense of outrage, and it rewards fast opinions, not hard facts.
And we don’t want to ever become reliant on a small number of big money supporters. That’s how media loses its independence. Serious journalism is serious business, not a charity case, and nobody wins when outlets become the personal property of the super rich — just ask the Washington Post and Jeff Bezos how that’s going.
But can a publication like The Pillar do serious reporting, stay free to read, and rely on paying subscribers to make it all happen? That’s the experiment, and the results aren’t nearly firm enough yet for me to make the call.
We don’t tend to think of things as "institutions" until they’ve been around for a while because they are by their nature supposed to be stable, rooted in and supported by a community which values them. And the truth is The Pillar might be standing taller every day, but we need it to be on much firmer ground if it’s going to stay upright.
Yes, we have got thousands and thousands of new free subscribers over the last few weeks and months. But the number of paying subscribers has moved backwards. Simply put, more and more people are deciding The Pillar is worth reading, but fewer people are willing or able to pay for what they are reading.
Now, I’m not panicking or anything. At least I’m trying not to. More than a quarter of our paying subscribers simply drop off when it comes time to renew, that’s just part of the churn of a subscription based business.
But dropping off they are. And at a rate that is simply not sustainable.
The experiment of what we want The Pillar to be, and how we want it to work, is going to prove itself, or fail, on a simple question: will ours readers — not people like you, but actually you — choose to make it endure?
Is it reasonable for us to trust people to read something for free, see the work we’re doing, and decide for themselves that it is worth paying for — not as a gift or a donation, but as value for money.
That’s the $8 question I am asking you right now. No gimmicks, no ‘pretty please’. We’re not looking for handouts here. I’m just asking you to ask yourself: Is the work we do, the work you read (and listen to, if you like the Pillar Podcast and Sunday School) worth paying for?
If you genuinely don’t think so, there’s no hard feelings. There’s no argument I can or want to make that speaks better than the work we do.
We’ll keep doing our best, working with whatever people we have who are in this with us for as long as we can.
But I’ve been in the business of Catholic journalism for a while now and I am certain of this: ultimately, you either get what you’re willing to pay for, or you’re left with what someone else will give you for free.
And if you do read this email, and you do decide that the laborers deserve their wages, I promise you this: we’re plowing every penny into doing what we do — and do it better whenever we can.
We’ve already got a frankly world-beating network of freelancers from every corner of the Church we can get to, from Rome to Ukraine to Africa to Latin America to the Philippines. But like I said up top, there’s more news to cover than ever, and we want and need to cover it better.
What we can’t do is stand still.
The reality is if we tried, we’d be out of paid subscribers and out of business before The Pillar can turn five this time next year. And I want it to turn five, and 10, and God willing 25. I’d like it to be bigger than and last longer than everyone working here today — me and JD first of all. And I think it should, because the society of the Church is always going to need the serious service of honesty and truth, not tribalism and PR.
What I am saying is, I’d like The Pillar to grow to become an institution, not go down as a failed experiment. The few of us working here are doing the best we can to make that happen.
The rest is up to you.
So, what do you say?
See you Friday,
Ed. Condon
Editor
The Pillar
