Bad news, good news, new news
Happy weekend friends,
I’m sorry to interrupt your Saturday — I’m sorry to interrupt my Saturday, come to that — but we need you to read this.
The Pillar has been up and running for nearly four years now, something I would have called a coin toss, at best, when we launched in January 2021, with just JD, me, and a pair of heavily used laptops.
I’m both grateful and proud we’re still in business, and staggered at the generosity and support (human and divine) which has allowed us to grow into the most-read and (arguably) most influential independent Catholic news source in the English language.
But here’s the thing, The Pillar survives on simple math, and three things remaining constant:
That we keep attracting new free readers at the same steady pace;
That a steady percentage of those new free readers see the value of what we are doing and decide for themselves it is worth becoming a paying subscriber;
And that these new paying subscribers are enough to offset the annual drop-off from our existing paying subscribers — which is about 30 percent.
We have some bad news on that score:
The simple, brutal facts are these: points one and three have held steady — thousands of new readers sign up to get our newsletters and read the site for free every month, and hundreds of existing paying subscribers are dropping off.
That is what it is: Credit card details change, it’s a pain to fill out the billing details all over again, and for a lot of people, economic times are tough. We get it. Like I said, we expect turnover; we factor it in as a constant part of our business plan.
But our new free readers are not choosing to take the plunge and join the team they way they were in previous years, enough to offset the normal attrition. That’s the problem for us — and it is becoming a big problem.
We’re covering more stories and breaking more serious news than ever. More people than ever are reading and sharing it. But fewer and fewer are choosing to help support making it happen.
If something doesn’t give, we’re approaching “hard choices” territory at the end of the year and we — and by that I mean all of us — don’t want to get there.
The Pillar is only free to do what it does because we don’t chase big money donations, and because no one owns The Pillar but JD and me. For us, that’s what truly being independent means.
We’re only accountable to you, our readers, and to the truth.
And we think making The Pillar’s news free to read for everyone is an essential part of offering our work as a service to the Church, so we don’t ever want to have to paywall the site, or worse, fill it with ads — chasing clicks is easy money, but very bad for the business of serious journalism.
This only works if enough of our free readers care enough about what we’re doing to help us keep doing it.
But if we’ve come to a point where people aren’t seeing the need as clearly as they were in previous years, I can understand why.
We’ve been at this a while now.
In all modesty, The Pillar is at a point where I can understand if new readers just assume we’ve always been here, and will always be around.
You can’t keep the fresh smell of a scrappy upstart forever, I know. But the reality is The Pillar is built differently to every other Catholic news site you can read, and we’re doing things no one else does.
So, if you’ve been reading us for a while, but aren’t sold on what your $8 would help achieve, please give me five minutes to walk you through three things our journalism has done just in the last few weeks.
It’s good news.
Last month, our most recent addition to the team, Edgar Beltran, profiled a mass wedding in a small suburban parish in Spain. The local pastor noticed that he had a lot — A LOT — of unmarried couples coming to Mass or bringing their kids in for the sacraments.
He didn’t just preach on the sanctity of marriage or the importance of the Church’s moral law, he got to know these couples and the reasons why they had been living together for years without getting married. For some, it was a paperwork problem, for others it was money for a wedding, for many, it was a sense of social isolation — if they had a wedding, they had no one to come.
So the priest got the whole parish, the whole town really, together to help all these couples make it to the altar and share a celebration. It was awesome. And it made a nice story, you should read it if you haven’t.
But here’s what that reporting achieved — we’ve heard from bishops in several other countries who told us they read that story, forwarded it to their own priests, and told them to try something similar in their parishes.
That’s a real ripple effect — new kinds of pastoral care reaching marginalized couples leading (hopefully) to new sacramental marriages in dioceses across a continent.
Second, over the last two weeks, we broke the story of a lawsuit brought against Fr. Thomas Rosica over allegations of sexual assault against another priest.
Rosica, in addition to being a formerly prominent media figure, was also a long-time official Vatican media attaché and a participant and spokesman during the 2019 Vatican summit on clerical abuse. You can understand, then, why breaking this story matters.
But this week, we also published a long interview with the priest who accused Rosica of assaulting him. Even though he filed his lawsuit anonymously, Fr. Michael Bechard chose to come to The Pillar to tell his story.
He told us that he’s “not looking to burn anything down. I'm just looking for a sense of accountability within the institution.”
It’s not clear where this story will go next. But lots of people, like him, have trusted us to tell their stories — and to help promote a culture of accountability in the Church — and it’s something I hope we can live up to.
Finally, I want to flag the situation in the Chadean Catholic Church — where leading bishops in Iraq have been in a very tense and quickly escalating standoff. It is a complicated story involving not just ecclesiastical affairs and personalities, but relations with the Iraqi government and even a local militia leader.
Last week, it looked a lot like the Church could be on the verge of a serious formal split between the patriarch and several of his bishops. It’s a very complicated story to report out, and it took us some real hours to do so.
But I am glad we did, for two reasons — First, we ended up being the only outlet I can see who did cover the story in full.
Second, we heard from several senior clerics close to both sides in Iraq, they told us our coverage actually helped diffuse the situation — that when we laid out how close the Chaldean bishops were coming to a schism, it made both sides take a breath and dial things down.
Whatever happens next, if that is even a little bit true, it’s easily the thing I am most proud of The Pillar helping to achieve this year.
Those three stories are just a snapshot of what The Pillar’s journalism has helped achieve for the Church in the last month. That is the kind of work we are doing month in, month out.
I don’t know how to make a clearer case for helping us keep going than that. In fact, I am not sure there is one to be made.
But, in the spirit of offering something more for our paying subscribers, we’re giving our free readers a peak behind the curtain right now with something new.
As most of you know, paying subscribers get access to Starting Seven, Luke Coppen’s peerless morning Catholic news roundup — bringing you what you need to know and might want to read from everywhere else in the Church before your day even starts.
Well, this month, we have taken a section of Starting Seven, Luke’s quick-hit Look Closer analysis series, and given it its own dedicated section on The Pillar’s website. Basically, we realized Look Closer was so good, it deserved to be read and appreciated on its own terms.
And, to show people what they have been missing, we’ve unlocked it for free readers for the month of September — you can check it out here, for now. Come October 1, it will go back to being for paid subs only.
If supporting our news output and keeping it free to read for the whole Church isn’t enough to tempt you to become a paid subscriber, believe me when I say getting access to Luke’s morning newsletter and regular Look Closer analysis is worth the money all on its own.
OK, that’s it.
That’s my pitch.
I’m deadly serious when I say we need our free readers, you, to please think hard about why you read The Pillar. And if you think our journalism is worth reading, I’m asking you to please consider if it's worth paying for.
Because there is simply no other way The Pillar can keep doing what we do the way we’ve been doing it.
Thank you. I mean that.
See you next week,
Ed. Condon
Editor
The Pillar
