It was old home week among religion reporters last week as more than 100 people gathered for a first-ever online conference of the Religion News Association to listen to speakers and receive awards for stories written in 2019.
For an event that included six panels featuring more than 30 speakers of all shapes, sizes and colors of the faith rainbow for the benefit of 123 journalists, the two-day event went off amazingly well.
The one downside was a sobering report on the dwindling finances of the RNA. The future outlook is bad, quite honestly, and unless something dramatic happens, RNA may either go bankrupt or rely entirely on volunteers within a few years. More on that in a moment.
Overseeing the event was RNA’s COO, Tiffany McCallen, who –- with one helper doing tech assistance -– was running the affair from a location near Columbus, Ohio that had excellent internet. I was on the conference committee, so was privy to some of the immense amount of planning needed to stage the event. In addition to panels on everything from race to the mental health of clergy during the COVID-19 era, there were “green rooms” for new members, those who wanted to do karaoke and a virtual bar. The latter was a salute to former days when RNA’ers would gather in a hotel room after the awards banquet and load up on liquor.
The virtual event was much tamer, believe me.
I helped plan the first panel of the conference, which was on whether churches, temples or synagogues should be considered “essential services” that should not be shut because of COVID-19. Robert Tyler, a lawyer who has represented many California congregations that wish to remain open, told us that because religious services aren’t available, suicide calls went up 800% in one part of Los Angeles County.
Other panelists talked about how problematic it is to try singing in a mask, even though public singing seems to be one of the chief way COVID-19 is transmitted. “It’s not about essential or non-essential,” said Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback of the Stephen Wise Temple in Bel Air, Calif., another panelist. “It’s about keeping people safe.” Not surprisingly, he added, “The national leadership on this has been terrible.”
The most humorous of the speakers was the Rev. Alvin Gwynn, Sr., a Baltimore pastor who ordered police out of his church when they tried to stop services last spring. The officials were so confused as to what was and was not allowed, Gwynn had to call the governor’s office to get a straight answer.
Following this was a panel on clergy health, where unfortunately only six minutes was left for questions from journalists. The moderator seemed mystified as to how to work Zoom, meaning most of our questions in the queue never got posed. The panel, which featured an imam from Memphis, a rabbi from Atlanta and care coordinator at a Christian counseling center in Lancaster, Pa., was quite diverse. Fortunately, the rabbi, Pamela Gottfried, did speak to one of the topics under discussion: Whether people are leaving their congregations because of the coronavirus.
The short answer: Yes.
Unfortunately, I got called away and only got to listen to half of a panel on race, but it appeared to have some wonderful speakers, including P.K. Thompson, a Samoan who was the first Pacific Islander (I believe) to appear at an RNA convention. There were some great quotes on that panel, ie one that pointed out that those who speak truth to power often do so out of their own suffering. The tape of the meeting will be on the RNA site sometime this week, although I think it’s only available to those who registered for the conference.
On a Friday panel about religious lobbying, there was an engaging spokesman for Black Nonbelievers of DC (first time I’d heard of them) along with a Baha’i official, a Uyghur advocate and the director of the Evangelical Environmental Network, who did not have good things to see about President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency appointees. The latter estimated that 40% of evangelicals are interested in climate change mainly because they’re experiencing the results of it via hurricanes and floods.
I was amazed more journalists weren’t peppering this panel with questions, as I found all of them fascinating. Being online does deaden the back-and-forth that enlivens the typical meeting. This year, people could log in or out of a session, or just lurk, which thinned participation by a lot. And there weren’t the typical number of questions being asked that you’d get at a live event mainly because a lot of journalists were clearly trying to put in a day of work while keeping one ear cocked toward the conference.
We also had to give up attending our annual awards banquet in person, settling instead for a YouTube presentation, which featured acceptance speeches from some of the winners. You can see the full slate of winners here.
The RNA met for its annual business meeting on Thursday afternoon, which is where we learned some pretty dismal figures about our finances. Ken Chitwood, the treasurer, told us we have about $94,000 in cash and another $137,000 in investments, which is stunningly low for a 350-member organization. Over the past two years, the RNA has run up a budget deficit of about $40,000, mainly because expenses have skyrocketed after RNA’s parent organization, the Religion News Foundation, pulled away from the RNA.
The two organizations had operated in tandem until Tom Gallagher, then-head of the foundation and publisher of Religion News Service (another RNF subsidiary), forced the two groups to separate. Because the RNA was no longer sharing benefits providers, facilities, legal help and staff with the RNF, it had to suddenly pay out of pocket for all those services. For a professional journalism organization that charges pretty minimal dues to its members and doesn’t have any major sugar daddies, that was a huge blow.
As a result, the RNA has cut loose all its staff except for McCallen, who will be going part-time after the conference to try to conserve on funds. McCallen has said previously that she plans to look for full-time work elsewhere, so atop everything else, the board has to figure out how to replace her if she leaves.
Thus, a major part of the business meeting was discussion on where to go from here. The RNA board wants to change the organization from being a 501c6 trade organization to a 501c3 non-profit to make it easier for it to get tax-deductible contributions. How much the change will boost RNA’s precarious finances was not clear.
Speaking of the RNF, Gallagher was let go last December — as I reported back then — and was replaced this past April with Deborah Caldwell, a longtime journalist and media executive who had joined the foundation board in 2017. Caldwell was given major time during the business meeting to talk about the RNF’s goals and a list of projects the foundation had planned, including the Religion Journalist Relief Fund, which provides grants of up to $1,000 for 10 journalists to pursue religion enterprise stories, and another initiative, Report for America, a training program to place 10 religion journalists in 10 newsrooms by 2021.
But none of that money is directly going to the RNA, even indirect funds — usually 10 percent — of any project grant that RNF gets. That would allow RNA to hire more staff (ie for fundraising and accounting) and pay some basic bills.
Now in the spring of 2018 and 2019, GetReligion ran reports about a $4.9 million grant –- called the Global Religion Journalism Initiative — from the Lilly Foundation that would create 13 new religion reporting positions at the Associated Press, Religion News Service and TheConversation (yet another foundation subsidiary), for 18 months. That grant is running out.
So I spent much of the business session messaging Caldwell to ask if the grant would be renewed. It definitely will, she messaged back, but the new grant won’t include funds for AP, which is applying on its own for a separate grant. All the journalists hired under the first grant will remain. So, the RNF may not get $4.9 million again, but it will get a substantial amount. Ten percent of even half that, say $250,000, would buy some time for the RNA.
So stay tuned for more news on that score. The RNA, which with just over $200,000 in total assets, is not going to last much longer if it doesn’t get some major help. I know from experience (of being on the board of another journalism-related group) that reporters are rarely good fundraisers and don’t like asking for money.
Still, you gotta do what you gotta do, and if the current board — which has Betsy Shirley of sojo.net (Sojourners magazine) as its new president — doesn’t want the RNA to go under, it had better roll up its collective sleeves and come up with more plans than I heard talked about last week.
Where are those fund-raising televangelists when you need them?
MAIN IMAGE: In this screenshot from last week’s RNA conference, participants listen in on a Zoom discussion on whether religious congregations provide essential services. From top left, they are RNA COO Tiffany McCallen (who is monitoring various Zoom feeds), Julia Duin, RNA board member Manya Brachear Pashman, retired sociologist Dr. John Hawthorne, RNS editor-in-chief Paul O’Donnell, attorney/panelist Robert Tyler and (at the bottom) moderator Deepa Bharath.