Lilly Foundation

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Nonprofit groups destined to command big chunk of journalism? What about religion news?

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As the 2020s dawn, the Internet-ravaged newspaper business is paying close attention to The Salt Lake Tribune, long known for independent-minded reporting that includes stellar religion coverage by Peggy Fletcher Stack and colleagues. The  148-year old Trib is conducting an experiment as the first important U.S. daily to turn non-profit. 

A related phenomenon is wealthy investors who needn’t fret about profits purchasing, e.g., the Boston Globe, Las Vegas Review-Journal, Los Angeles Times, Philadelphia Daily News, Philadelphia Inquirer, San Diego Union-Tribune, Washington Post, Time magazine and The Atlantic. (The latter made good use of a $490,000 Henry Luce Foundation grant for religion coverage.) 

Are charities and nonprofit groups destined to command a major chunk of American news reporting, including religion coverage? 

 On the religion beat, we see The Associated Press’s deal to distribute copy from two non-profits, Religion News Service (which has emphasized opinion pieces in recent times) and TheConversation.com (which re-frames scholars’ thinking for general audiences).  This innovation is funded by $4.9 million from the Lilly Endowment. (Disclosure: The Guy was an AP religion writer 1998-2006). 

An example of this newborn joint operation is “Reparations and Religion: 50 Years after ‘Black Manifesto’,” a solid  RNS article The AP transmitted December 30 that was widely picked up online by other media.

Notably, the article has a double byline. Matthew Cressler, no journalist  but a religion-and-race scholar at the College of  Charleston, is named first out of alphabetical order, indicating priority over co-author Adelle Banks, a well-respected RNS reporter.


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Religion News Service fallout III -- A press release sheds neither heat nor light

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More fallout continueth from the Religion News Service explosions of two weeks ago with the release of a press release that sounds like a directive out of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984.

A quick review: tmatt’s April 24 post was the first reporting by anyone on this on RNS’s problems. Then I offered this mega-piece on the 26th,  which beat two magazine stories on the topic by almost a day. Then I followed up with this piece on the 27th, which looked at those pieces in The New Republic and the Columbia Journalism Review and then included the first official word of the Religion News Foundation's upcoming $4.9 million Lilly Endowment grant.

Make sure to bone up on the history of this conflict before going further. All that, plus Richard “Religion Guy” Ostling’s memo a few days later has resulted in some pretty decent coverage and commentary from the team here at GetReligion.

So this past Monday, RNS, through its crisis PR firm Athene Strategies, released the following:

COLUMBIA, Mo. -- Recent announcements at Religion News Service, including new staff and a pending $4.9 million grant, demonstrate the strategic adjustments RNS is making to honor its 84-year legacy and ensure its bright future.

With these changes, RNS aims to do more than simply survive in a 21st century media landscape. Our vision requires bringing renewed energy and an innovation mindset to the field of religion journalism. By educating and informing a growing audience, we can help cultivate mutual understanding among people of different cultures, faiths and traditions. The result? More peaceful, pluralistic communities around the world.

So RNS holds a key to world peace? That's quite a journalistic mission.

We can do better. This reminds me of the “community journalism” craze of a few decades back mixed with UNESCO agitprop. Am also curious why the story is datelined out of Missouri. Yes, I know there are administrative ties to the University of Missouri, but why not dateline it in Washington, DC where RNS is based? 


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Sign of the times? Henry Luce Foundation subsidizes Godbeat work at The Atlantic

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Sign of the times? Henry Luce Foundation subsidizes Godbeat work at The Atlantic

Through much of U.S. history, newspapers and magazines were commercial enterprises where circulation and advertising revenues paid for journalism.

Times change. Obviously, both income streams are drying up in the Internet age. Cable TV news channels exist by delivering eyeballs to advertisers, but they’ve done little with complex and specialized fields like religion. (A notable TV exception is non-commercial, the “Religion & Ethics Newsweekly" show on PBS.)

A  future possibility is that subsidies from non-profits will largely supplant that business model.  If so, can reporters to support themselves? Will substantive news reporting mean chancey freelancing, or only part-time employment, or journalism as an unpaid hobby? Will reporters lacking old-style staff jobs make their actual living from public relations work, with conflicts of interest readers are unaware of? Will print media become expensive channels reaching a small elite audience?

Such grim thoughts are roused by the recent announcement of a significant $490,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation for religion coverage by The Atlantic and theatlantic.com. With this two-year grant, the magazine will hire a full-time religion editor and a second journalist with the goal of providing “the best conversation about global religion available today.”

An ambitious claim. But in its D.C.-based phase The Atlantic, at 159 years old, is the ASME’s 2016 Magazine of the Year and arguably America’s most important general-interest monthly. It has distinguished itself recently with a series of informative -- even definitive -- religion articles.


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You have $1.25 million: Who gets that check if the goal is basic, balanced religion-news reporting?

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Here at the Washington Journalism Center, the full-semester program I lead at the DC center for the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, we have a number of sayings that are repeated over and over that they turn into journalism mantras. I imagine that will be true when we reboot the program next year in New York City at The King's College.

One of these sayings goes like this: Everybody in this city knows more stories than you do. I also like to stress this: The most important skill in journalism is the ability to accurately state the views of someone with whom you disagree. And then there's one that is discussed here frequently, in this Keller-istic, Twitter-driven age in which the digital line between newswriting and editorializing is often quite faded and hard to spot: Opinion is cheap; information is expensive.

Then there is another WJC mantra that moves us closer to some news sure to intrigue those interesting in religion-beat coverage in the mainstream press. This one isn't very snappy, but it's a concept that is crucial for young journalists to grasp. Here it is: In the future there will be no one dominant business model (think newspaper chains built on advertising, mixed with the sale of dead-tree pulp) for mainstream journalism, but multiple approaches to funding the creation of information and news.

I warned you that it wasn't short and snappy.

Obviously, one of the crucial emerging models right now is the growing world of non-profit and foundation-driven journalism.


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