Happy Tuesday friends,
You probably know this already, but JD is a pretty class act of a guy.
He hates spiking the football after a touchdown, and he’s not really one for making a big deal when something big happens. I like that about him. I admire it, too, and I like to think it’s part of how we do things here at The Pillar.
We aren’t big on making a noise about “us,” and our general philosophy is that real news advertises itself.
We don’t run ads on our site, so we don’t make any money from “clicks” or page views. That means there’s no incentive — and no reward — for us to write click bait headlines or fill the site up with spam.
It also means that when you read something on The Pillar, it’s because we think we’re bringing something new to the story, an angle or expertise you can’t read somewhere else. Even better, whenever possible, it’s because we’re reporting something you simply can’t read anywhere else.
Case in point: yesterday, we broke the news that on Saturday Pope Francis met with the nuncio to the United States and the prefect of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Bishops to discuss Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas.
Specifically, they met to discuss asking for his resignation. That’s a big deal.
Google around and you can find dozens of opinion pieces fulminating for and against Bishop Strickland, and YouTube videos of talking heads telling you exactly what they think, and therefore what you should think, about this story.
But here’s the thing: they’re all riffing on the news, on our story, which only we reported. That’s business as usual, and it’s fine by us. We report the news, other people tell you their opinions. That’s how we like it. But having an opinion is easy, and cheap. Reporting the news isn’t.
It takes years of relationship building, months of conversations you can’t be sure will lead anywhere, and weeks of locking down who is in town and what’s on their agenda before it happens.
If it was easy to find out who is advising the pope to do what about whom, everyone would do it.
This goes for a whole slate of stories we’re covering right now, whether it’s on-the-ground reporting from India, where there’s a schism brewing, from Nigeria, where Christians are facing a Biblical level of persecution, or from China, where the rubber of high-level Vatican diplomacy is hitting the hard road facing bishops, priests, and laity trying to live the faith in the face of CCP oppression.
We bring you what’s happening inside the U.S. bishops’ conference, on episcopal accountability and Church financial reform. We’re on top of the financial scandal in Vatican City, breaking the stories that are making change happen. And we’re bringing you conversations with the cardinals who are going to play a big role in the next few years.
We want to keep breaking the news, setting public conversation in the life of the Church, and making sure that conversation has the facts.
To do that, The Pillar needs subscribers. It’s that simple.
We’re honored that our readers give our work their time and attention and their trust — we never take that for granted. And we can see from the data how many people are reading our work, compared to other Catholic media outlets.
The results are deeply flattering but, like I said, we don’t make a penny from pageviews. Still, we do have to pay the bills, we have to pay our writers, and our writers have families to support — so do JD and I, as it happens.
We don’t have a board of big money donors, we don’t have a nice little endowment fund or a Manhattan real estate portfolio to live off of. Other Catholic news sites do, and that’s cool. Good for them. There’s nothing bad or sinister about it.
But The Pillar is strictly business.
On one level it’s a partnership between JD and me, since we own The Pillar between us, no one else. On another level, it’s a partnership with our team, with Michelle, Luke, Kate, Brendan and all the other writers and contributors who put news on our site and podcasts on our feed.
On the most important level, though, it’s a partnership between all of us — editors, writers, and readers — because we cannot do this, any of this, without each other.
Our whole business plan is that if we report the news freely and fairly and better than anyone else, our readers — like you — will see the value of that, and help us keep going.
We are a newsstand with an honesty box. We don’t have a paywall, and we don’t want to have one, because we consider what we do a service to the wider society of the Church, and it’s one we’re glad to offer. It’s also a matter of trust.
We trust that if we work hard to earn and keep your trust, enough of our readers will be there with us, choosing to pay for the news you're reading because you think it’s worth it and because you want to keep it free to read for those who really can’t afford it.
We’ve staked our careers trusting those people, people like you, to become paying subscribers. That’s our only source of income, give or take some advertising on our podcast and newsletters, and it’s not easy.
Right now, about 30% of our paying subscribers turn over annually. Sometimes people’s circumstances change, and the $5 a month we ask simply becomes an expense they can’t spare. Sometimes we report a story people don’t like, and would prefer we didn’t tell. Most of the time though, infuriatingly, it’s just because people’s billing information changes and they drop off.
But it all means we have to grow by 30% a year just to stand still. And we need your help.
Yours. Specifically, you.
Millions of people read our website every month. Tens of thousands of people have signed up to get our weekly newsletters for free.
We’re glad they read us, but I wish a fraction of them would volunteer to be paying subscribers. If they did, we have some seriously cool plans for how big and bad The Pillar could become.
But the truth is, they won’t. We rely on the margins, the self-selecting, proud and happy few who read an email like this and think “yeah, The Pillar is worth it to me.”
I hope that’s you. I’m trusting it’s you. We need you on the team. There’s nobody doing what The Pillar does but us, and there’s nobody who can keep us going but you. We need you.
So please, if you can, become a subscriber.
Thanks for reading, and see you Friday.
Ed. Condon
Editor
The Pillar
