Happy Wednesday, friends,
I am not going to spin your wheels with a fluffy preamble here, I need to say something and it’s as best to get straight to the point.
Pope Leo this week offered a deeply encouraging reflection on the nature and purpose and necessity of real journalism.
He called for it to “be water that deeply quenches the thirst for knowledge of people of different generations; to nourish consciences with news, not gossip; to offer a correct and transparent interpretation of reality; to unite, through good times and bad, the community in which it is rooted, protecting its history and memory.”
If I am being honest, it’s rather more poetically put than I would have managed myself, but it is exactly what we set The Pillar up to be and to do five years ago.
We try — and I think we do it better than anyone else in the Catholic world by some margin — to bring you real, hard facts, never gossip.
Facts that are often very hard to come by, when dealing with the most sensitive issues of accountability in the public life of the Church. We’ve grown used to calls for transparency from all levels of the hierarchy, but we are nailed-down committed to making it a reality, for the good of the Church — making her the best version of herself as an institution, and as a society of the faithful where trust and communion can flourish.
It is not easy work, and I know it isn’t always easy reading. But I’m proud of what we have been able to get done, even just in the last few months.
Getting back to Pope Leo’s words, offering a “correct and transparent interpretation of reality” is something we take every bit as seriously as our reporting. And with major events looming in the Church, like the expected SSPX consecrations in two weeks, there is an immediate need for the kind of analyses and explainers we are turning out.
But the way to make a success of a media operation in the online era is to go the opposite way — distortion, misrepresentation, sensationalism, partial information and partisan spin get clicks and for most places out there, clicks mean money.
Not for us. Here’s the straight talk: All those millions of readers don’t mean a thing for The Pillar’s work practically. We don’t do website ads, and we don’t see a penny of revenue from page views or link clicks.
It doesn’t make a dime for us if we’re the most-read Catholic media outlet in the English speaking world — and that’s how we want it.
Click-based revenue drives clickbait coverage. We’ve seen how that goes, and we want no part of those perverse incentives.
And unlike almost every other Catholic media operation, we don’t do “donations,” we aren’t a 501c something, we have no “major benefactors” and no board of trustees or directors funding us and telling us which way to look or not look, depending on what they want to read. No one owns The Pillar except me and JD. That’s what real independent journalism looks like.
Sometimes we get a sponsorship for a Friday or Tuesday newsletter or our podcast episodes, but 90% of our income comes just one way: subscriptions.
And those subscriptions only come from one place: people who want news not gossip, reality not spin, read it here and make the choice to pay for what they read. Not out of the goodness of their hearts, but because what we do has value — it contributes something real and tangible to the public life of the Church. And we do for exceptional value for money, though I say it myself.
But here’s the thing: We think real journalism — the kind Pope Leo described — is a service, first to the truth, and second to our common society. So we do everything we can to keep all our work free to read as it goes live.
Paying subscribers get access to our full archives, the off-topic sections of our newsletters, podcast bonus episodes, and the frankly ludicrously excellent morning roundup email Starting 7, but when we print the news, that news is free to read.
When you consider the number of readers we have who are either clerics or professed religious with minimal disposable income, or living in parts of the world where $8 a month is a fortune, we see this as a moral imperative. And we know that the general economic weather isn’t great — believe me, we know — and that $8 a month might be great value for money here, but it’s still money.
But staying free to read comes at a serious cost. Other sites, Catholic and mainstream media, rip our work off all the time, and increasingly AI is just scraping our stories wholesale and repackaging them without any attribution at all.
For us, that means one thing: it means it’s a lot harder for free readers of The Pillar, like you, to see what makes us different. And let me be blunt, because I have to be: if I can’t convince you, as a free reader of The Pillar, that our news isn’t just worth reading, it’s worth paying for, we have a problem.
Because if I can’t convince you that $8 is a fair price for what we produce, we won’t be here in another five years. That’s the simple business reality.
You’re reading this email because you read our news, because you know we don’t waste your time, and because you know there’s value to what we are doing. So I am asking you to go all the way with us on this.
The Pillar isn’t an agenda and it isn’t a charity case. It’s a project, it’s a group of people who love the Church, and who want to serve her through a service to the truth. We don’t want you to be part of this team, we need you to be part of it. We can’t do it without you.
Are you with us?
See you Friday,
Ed. Condon
Editor
The Pillar
