This is all a choice
A Wednesday Pillar Post
Happy Wednesday friends,
This is not your regularly scheduled Pillar Post, what will come on Friday as normal.
There is a lot of news going on right now, and I’ve every reason to expect we’re going to see an uptick in the sort of stories people tend to ask us questions about.
Case in point: yesterday it emerged that Pope Francis has ordered Cardinal Raymod Burke out of his Vatican apartment and, by extension, stripped him of the stipend afforded to cardinals in residence in Rome.
After the news first surfaced on an Italian site, a lot of people called, texted, and emailed us to ask what was going on, and if we were going to cover it.
But as more outlets were picking up the story, one American cleric told us that he simply couldn’t be sure it was true until he read it on The Pillar.
That kind of feedback means a lot. It’s a confirmation of what we want The Pillar to be all about and how we want it to work. We don’t ever want to write something you could read somewhere else, or worse just repeat what someone else has said they heard.
If you read it at The Pillar, it matters to us that you know it's true because you know we did the legwork to make sure of the facts — no matter if everyone else is already talking about some version of it, or no one else has got the story at all.
We only do reporting one way, and that’s building and maintaining a network of sources we trust, so we can produce the news that you can trust.
That’s how we were able to report — before anyone else did — that Bishop Strickland was going to be asked to resign months before he was forced from office, and that Pope Francis had delegated a canon lawyer to look at changes to the law governing what happens around a papal election.
Working that way is seriously labor intensive, and means a lot of time on the phone and on the road, building the kind of relationships that allow our sources to trust us with important news when it's happening. But we choose to work that way, because that’s the only way we know to deliver the kind of reporting we want to stand behind.
We also know that good reporting makes things happen. Here’s an example — ahead of the USCCB meeting this month, we reported that a draft document on voting had made a change in language, which could seem to devalue the rhetorical priority the U.S. bishops place on fighting abortion.
Well, a number of bishops read that in The Pillar. And so several of them proposed amendments to change the text to stronger language, which happened as the bishops met in Baltimore. More than one bishop told us he was only informed about the issue because he read it in The Pillar. Whatever the outcome, we’re glad to help keep even bishops informed about the stuff their conference is working on.
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The cheap and easy thing to do would be to churn out opinion pieces about all these things, either telling you how to think about them or (worse) trying to guess how you’ll feel about a story and tell you what you want to hear. That kind of thing is good for clicks, which for most news sites means good for business. But The Pillar doesn’t work that way.
We don’t have ads on our site, which means we don’t make a penny from page views. That’s another choice we made, because we don’t ever want to set ourselves up with a perverse incentive to write sensationalist stories we aren’t sure about, or to turn serious news into clickbait.
In fact, apart from the odd sponsorship for a newsletter or our podcast, we don’t have any source of revenue except one: voluntary paying subscribers. That’s the biggest choice we made in setting The Pillar up.
Unlike pretty much every other Catholic news site, we did not set up a charity, or a non-profit — though some friends encouraged us to go that way — which means we don’t have a board of big money donors and we can’t offer anyone a tax break for a big cheque.
Honestly, we made life a little (maybe a lot) harder for ourselves going that way, but we think it was worth it. It’s worth it to us that no one owns The Pillar except JD and me, 50-50.
It’s worth it to us because, as has happened, when a cardinal is irate about a story we published and starts calling around looking to find out who our donors are to lean on them to get us shut down, there was no one to call.
That’s what independent journalism means to us: we are accountable to the truth, to each other, to God, and you — the reader. Nobody else.
The Pillar is the sum of all these choices, and we wouldn’t change any of them.
But here’s the thing: Reading The Pillar is a choice, too.
Signing up to get our newsletters, reading the articles, interviews and analyses we publish, these are choices you make, we hope, because you’ve seen the work we do and you see the value of it.
But we rely on you choosing to pay for it, too. That’s our business model — we are a news stand with an honesty box.
We know some of our readers sincerely cannot afford the subscription. Some of them are religious sisters and brothers who’ve taken literal vows of poverty, some are families for whom every single dollar matters right now. We get that, and we would never want to lock them out with a paywall.
But we trust that our readers, you, who virtually walk past our stand twice a week and pick up a paper, will do the honest thing and leave a few bucks in the jar to help us keep going.
We are trying to cover a lot of ground in the life of the Church — not just what’s happening in the Church in the US, or inside the Vatican, but on the ground in Poland, Nigeria, India, Ukraine, China, and all points in between.
To keep The Pillar going we ask for $8 a month, or $1.85 a week, or ¢90 a newsletter, or about a quarter each day, however you want to think about it.
Doing the work of journalism the way we do it is a choice we make. Reading it and trusting us to bring you the news — real news — is also a choice, one we’re sincerely grateful to you for making.
But reading our work won’t keep it going. So I’m asking you to choose to join us, to become a paying subscriber.
Think about the stories you’ve read at The Pillar and ask yourself: is this the kind of Catholic journalism I think the Church needs right now?
If it is, please, choose to make it happen.
Thank you.
See you Friday,
Ed. Condon
Editor
The Pillar