Let me stress something right up front.
The following is not a fundraising effort for The Pillar, the alternative Catholic news source that I think (and I believe Clemente Lisi is raising his hand as well) has become a must-read item in this age of crazy Catholic news events and trends. OK, news that is even crazier than NORMAL on that front.
We all struggle, in this age in which the Internet has debundled our news world and readers who really care about specific subjects — think Catholic news — have myriad options to choose from. The problem is figuring out which ones to support with, you know, money.
How many Substack options does one reader have the time to read? How many can said reader wave a credit card at, month after month?
Anyway, this week I received an email missive from The Pillar — “This is all a choice” — that was clearly a reminder to readers about the factors of time and money that I just mentioned.
But it was also a meditation by Ed Condon on one of the most painful realities in our splinted, niche-media world. Repeat after me: News is expensive. Opinion is cheap.
Thus, I want to point readers to sections of this letter that were valid “think piece” material for news-consumers who care about the digital religion beat. The “JD” is, of course, a reference to scribe J.D. Flynn.
Let’s start with a news event. Try to guess which one:
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. It took us a few hours to confirm things with our own sources, and the story made it into JD’s newsletter yesterday.
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.
But, once again: News is expensive. Opinion is cheap.
Travel costs money.
Time is money.
It’s hard for a tiny news team to compete with newsrooms that have 10 times as many reporters.
Journalists who are reading this know precisely what I am talking about.
So let’s keep reading.
We … 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,
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.
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.
One more passage.
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 enough for now. You can see the kinds of decisions that publishers — large and very small — are having to make these days. This is the reality, in the new debundled news marketplace.
Read it all. And good luck, readers, with your many choices about time and money.