Nonprofit journalism on the rise: What about religion news?
(OPINION) 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 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 The Conversation (which re-frames scholars’ thinking for general audiences). This innovation is funded by $4.9 million from the Lilly Endowment. (Disclosure: I 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 Dec. 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.
This is a timely piece, since most Democratic candidates for president have either advocated racial reparations to compensate African-Americans for slavery or want the federal government to study the idea. Also, as RNS reports, several religious agencies have been in the news with slavery compensation plans.
Background: As so often with public issues, a religious event jump-started the reparations debate 50 years ago. James Forman disrupted worship at New York City’s affluent Riverside Church to demand that white Christian and Jewish congregations give $500 million in slavery reparations to his Black Economic Development Conference (BEDC).
BEDC’s “Black Manifesto” asserted that the whites owed it “15 dollars per [n-word]” to pay for their sins of supporting “capitalism,” “colonialism” and “the most vicious, racist system in the world.” Months later, the Episcopal Church became the first sizable denomination to respond when a raucous General Convention approved a $200,000 payment via a black clergy group.
The AP transmitted an advisory that presumably will be standard: “This content is written and produced by Religion News Service and distributed by The Associated Press. RNS and AP partner on some religion news content. RNS is solely responsible for this story.” Meanwhile, AP’s spot piece on the United Methodist Church split carried a different advisory: “Associated Press religion coverage receives support from the Lilly Endowment through the Religion News Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for this content.”
The RNS article, in turn, came with an advisory that it was produced by a joint project on race in America with Sacred Writes. Like AP’s new partner The Conversation, Sacred Writes is short on newsroom experience and aims scholars’ ideas at a general readership.
Besides RNS, Sacred Writes media partners include CBS-TV’s soft religion programming, an NPR show, a scholarly YouTube channel, websites for left-wing feminists, communities of color and black Islam, and The Revealer at New York University’s Center for Religion and Media, which likewise mingles scholarship and journalism.
It may seem quaint in our age of tendentious cable TV news, but the AP traditionally was strictly staff-written and used interest groups, scholarly experts and other opinion-makers as sources that non-partisan reporters covered alongside those with alternative viewpoints. This new trend is something to monitor closely.
Different media topic: The Dispatch, a website led by Steven Hayes, former editor of The Weekly Standard (R.I.P.), officially launched this month.
One offering of note is weekly religion articles by evangelical attorney-commentator David French. His latest post plays off the United Methodist split with a big-picture depiction of U.S Christianity as a “triangle” in which “mainline” Protestantism breaks from the “high view of Scripture” in Catholicism and evangelicalism.
On similar lines, Wheaton College analyst Ed Stetzer told Baptist Press that a "respectful and dignified separation" would help both Methodist sides. One forms a "unity of progressive religion" with other "mainline" denominations while the other is freed to pursue "orthodox and biblical views of marriage," evangelism, and discipleship. Other denominations can learn from this "fresh start," he said.
This piece first appeared at Get Religion.