Here's how we work

Not The Pillar Post

Happy Wednesday friends,

Something interesting happened this morning which we wanted to bring to your attention.

The Vatican’s daily press bulletin listed Cardinal Gianfranco Ghirlanda among those who met with Pope Francis in a private audience today. 

You may recognize the cardinal’s name because The Pillar broke the story last weekend that Francis had asked Ghirlanda to draft some proposals to amend Universi Domenici gregis, the document which regulates what happens between when a pope dies and when (and how) his successor is elected.

Our story triggered a small avalanche of coverage and commentary in other Catholic outlets, with talking heads going back and forth, for and against the proposals. 

That’s great, as far as we’re concerned. We’re at our happiest when we break an important story, report something new, and help set the conversation in the public life of the Church. 

But the conversation got even more interesting on Monday, when Cardinal Ghirlanda issued a series of flat denials that he was working on any such project. 

Of course, we stand by our original reporting. We don’t break a story like that unless we have multiple, reliable, independent sources telling us the same thing.

And, from what we’re hearing, there’s an almighty ruckus going on in at least one Vatican department, trying to find out who leaked the information to us. 

Of course, that would be an odd reaction to have if there was nothing there to leak in the first place.

Either way, it’s likely that Pope Francis and Cardinal Ghirlanda had an interesting conversation today. 

If we hear anything firm enough to report, we will.

We mention all this to make a point: we set up The Pillar to report the news, to serve the truth in the life of the Church. If we aren’t sure about something, we don’t run it. You might think that’s an obvious way for a news outfit to conduct itself, but it isn’t always the case.

Some stories, like that the pope is considering changes to how his successor is chosen, are a big deal, and a lot of people want to read them. 

And for a lot of sites, getting people to read is the whole game — a big story means lots of clicks, which means lots of ad revenue. 

“Going viral” is the name of the game, and it can make for a powerful financial incentive to run with eye-catching stories, even if the sourcing isn’t all there.

We don’t work like that. 

We don’t run ads on our site, so we don’t make any money from “clicks” or page views. Not one penny. That means there’s no incentive — and no reward — for us to write clickbait. 

On the contrary, The Pillar relies on one thing only: a committed group of readers who follow our work, see its results, and decide for themselves that we are worth supporting. 

If we published speculation and sensation, seasoned with salty hot takes, we wouldn’t expect those subscribers to stick with us very long.

But hopefully by now, you’ve seen something different from us: A different way of working, a different way of reporting the news, and a different way of treating the most serious and important stories in the life of the global Church.

Hopefully, you’ve seen enough to decide that what you’re reading is worth paying for.

Our paying subscribers are the only reason The Pillar is in business. They aren’t just The Pillar’s readers, or customers, they are The Pillar — without them, we’d be out of business by Christmas.

We don’t have a slate of big money donors, we don’t have a nice little endowment fund or a Manhattan real estate portfolio to live off of. Other Catholic news sites do, and that’s cool. Good for them. There’s nothing bad or sinister about that, I guess, but it isn’t how we do business. 

We built ourselves to be different, so that we wouldn’t be influenced by any agenda except the truth. 

That means we have to work hard.  

We have to work hard to cultivate the relationships and sources that allow us to report stories you simply can’t read anywhere else. Those relationships take years to build, and they are the bedrock of the way we do journalism.

That is how we were the only journalists able to get hold of the draft summary document at the recent Vatican synod on synodality and publish a walkthrough of its controversial sections in real time. It’s how we covered amendments as the synod was debating them. It’s how we brought you a side-by-side look at what changed in the final version. 

Next week, we’ll be aiming to do the exact same thing when the U.S. bishops meet in Baltimore for their fall plenary assembly.

As usual, we’ll leave the rolling commentary and opinionating to everyone else, so we can focus on reporting what’s happening behind the scenes, as it happens, and breaking down what it means. 

That’s how we work.

Comment is free but facts are sacred, a British newspaper editor once said. And we consider our work to be a service to the sacred, in every sense. We don’t take what we do lightly.

We don’t have a paywall, and we don’t want to have one, because our work is an apostolate, and a service to the Church. 

It’s a service we’re glad to offer. But it’s also a matter of trust. 

We trust that if we work hard to earn and keep your trust, enough of our readers will be there with us, choosing to pay for the news they're reading, because they think it’s worth it, and because they want to keep it free to read for those who really can’t afford it.

We’ve staked our careers trusting people like you to become paying subscribers. That’s our only source of income, give-or-take some advertising on our podcast and newsletters.

That model is not easy.

Right now, about 30% of our paying subscribers drop off annually. Sometimes people’s circumstances change, and the $1.80 a week we ask simply becomes an expense they can’t spare. 

Sometimes we report a story people don’t like, and would prefer we didn’t tell. 

And sometimes it’s because people’s billing information changes and they don’t update their account. That happens.

But all of that means we have to grow by 30% a year just to stand still. And we need your help. 

Yours. Specifically, you.

Millions of people read our website every month. Tens of thousands of people have signed up to get our weekly newsletters for free. We’re glad they read us, and we wish a fraction of them would volunteer to be paying subscribers. If they did, we have some seriously cool plans for how big and bad The Pillar could become. 

But the truth is, they won’t. We rely on the margins, the self-selecting, the proud, the happy few who read an email like this and think “yeah, The Pillar is worth it to me.”

We are hoping that’s you. We’re trusting it’s you. We need you on the team. There’s nobody doing what The Pillar does but us, and we happen to like hard work. But there’s nobody who can keep us doing it except you. We need you.

So please, if you value the work we’re doing, be a real part of it. Subscribe.

Thanks, and see you Friday,

JD Flynn and Ed. Condon