Well, that was quick.

It wasn’t all that long ago that Tom Gallagher, a corporate lawyer and columnist for the National Catholic Reporter, talked his way into a position as CEO of the Religion News Foundation and as publisher of its subsidiary, Religion News Service. He was someone who had friends in high places. The idea was that he was a fundraiser who’d bring religion news the money and respect that it deserved, plus he’d create the business model for a wildly successful nonsectarian producer of religion content.

Yes, he created havoc by firing or pushing out several people in order to do it (read my April 2018 story on that here), and he was making changes to how the RNF related to the Religion News Association, an independent trade association of religion reporters. (The RNF is its public charity arm.) I heard a lot of talk at the most recent RNA annual convention in Las Vegas about how Gallagher’s decisions helped drive the RNA into a $30,000 deficit.

But Gallagher remained the man on top — until now. He’s the person who’s squarely in the middle of the photo atop this post, which is a screen shot of part of the RNF board. He’s in the blue sweater.

Then yesterday, a press release popped up on the RNS website about its new interim leader, Jerry Pattengale, a professor at Indiana Wesleyan University and an executive with the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., until he retired from the latter last year.

So Gallagher was out? By Tuesday afternoon, the RNF site had been altered to reflect new realities, and Gallagher’s name was also off the RNS masthead.

That doesn’t sound like an amicable parting, does it?

Yours truly began calling around and leaving messages with various RNF board members (and Gallagher himself). But him being a lawyer and all, folks were reluctant to talk. What follows is based on the responses that I did get.

Although Gallagher got the job because of his vaunted contact and ability to bring in the big money, apparently his fundraising prowess was not panning out. Former RNS folks told me that Gallagher had barely stepped into his position three years ago when he flew off to Abu Dhabi to talk with a moneyed sheik about some kind of RNS collaboration; as in the staff providing content for the United Arab Emirates Ministry of Tolerance.

“The staff went nuts,” one person told me. “‘No, Tom,’ they said, ‘this is not what we do.’”

Remember, Gallagher had no full-time news experience before getting handed this job. He was fortunate enough to step into a windfall; a $4.9 million grant from the Lilly Foundation that would link Religion News Service and The Conversation, a site that features commentary from academic experts in religion, and with the Associated Press. It would allow AP to run RNS content and it paid for the hiring of at least 13 reporters and editors to beef up the amount of religion news pieces coming into the mainstream press. I was told the arrangements for the grant were mostly in place by the time he arrived in November 2016, but he got to take a lot of the credit for it.

AP formally announced the grant in April of this year as “one of the biggest investments in religion news coverage in decades” (although I wrote about it a year before here), and by September, a lot of the new reporters at AP and RNS had been hired.

However, as of early this week, AP had only run three RNS stories on its national news wire (with a fourth coming soon), which is way below expectations. RNS puts out about eight articles per day (three of which are opinion pieces).

I heard about other things, such as Gallagher jacking up subscription rates for the smaller religious publications so high that the smaller outlets quit rather than pay up. Again, there was a lot of bad blood between him and his staff from all the staff firings and resignations in 2018, plus two longtime RNA employees –- who were mainstays of the organization –- announced their resignations late last summer. Word on the street was that they had had it with Gallagher’s meddling.

Pattengale, Gallagher’s replacement, looks to be temporary, and he regretfully informed me he couldn’t comment on RNS’ future until past deadline. So hopefully we’ll hear more from him. He was one of two RNF board members who informed the former RNS editor, Jerome Socolovsky, that he was fired on April 20, 2018. Socolovsky was replaced by religion-beat pro Bob Smietana.

Pattengale has got some solid evangelical credentials as a former executive for the Museum of the Bible and one of its founding scholars. He’s also provost at Indiana Wesleyan University and a sea change from Gallagher, a Roman Catholic who was accused by folks at RNS of giving out free press releases to liberal Catholic allies. We’ll see how hands-on Pattengale will be and how long he’ll remain at the helm.

As for what Gallagher did that was the tipping point, I cannot say that I know.

I did hear that he was supposed to show up (via phone or video hook-up, I believe) for a talk with the RNF board on Monday and that he failed to appear.

Clearly, he knew his time was up and that even his allies had had it with him.

Wendy Gustofson, an RNS marketing manager and communications director who was one of the earlier employees forced about by Gallagher, has told me several times about an explosive board meeting of RNA and RNF members in September 2017 where Smietana shouted at her when she criticized Gallagher. But at the most recent meeting in Las Vegas, Smietana approached her.

“He said, ‘I want to apologize to you, and we should have listened to you more,’” she said. “Maybe he now understands what it’s like to work for that idiot.” (I didn’t get to ask Smietana for his version of the story).

On Facebook, Kimberly Winston Ligocki, one of two RNS reporters who quit in April 2018 in protest of Socolovsky’s firing, celebrated.

“A year or two too late, but that karma, she always gets her man,” she wrote.