Many outlets are expressly affiliated with the Church, and even independent publications such as The National Catholic Reporter have fairly close ties with Catholic institutions.
A number of publications are solely dedicated to covering Catholicism, but the big differences between Crux and those organizations, Allen said, are independence and critical distance. “I expect if The Globe had launched a vertical exclusively dedicated to coverage of the Patriots and Red Sox, we would not be here,” Allen said.įrom the standpoint of religion journalism, the end of the Globe-supported version of Crux is a significant blow. A spokesperson for the Globe maintained that the paper will continue its same level of coverage of the Church-this without Allen and the laid-off staffers, and with the editor of the vertical, Teresa Hanafin, being “redeployed an exciting new position as an early morning writer for ,” as McGrory wrote in his memo. Religion journalism is a notoriously tough sell for publishers, and the fact that the Globe would emphasize the editorial quality and importance of Crux while still choosing to shutter it suggests a fear of investing in topical coverage that isn't directly appealing to advertisers. “It clearly is worrying for people who do this for a living to see a mainstream news organization like The Globe who launched a big project like this and then 18 months later backed out,” Allen said. The Globe could not have run a cleaner experiment in terms of testing market viability-as McGrory himself emphasized, the journalism was extremely high quality, but the dollars just weren’t there. Within the religion-journalism world, Crux quickly became a must-read, and Allen’s reporting is widely respected as some of the best-sourced in the business. Allen said the section rallied roughly 1 million monthly readers, and those numbers “easily doubled” during big news events related to the pope, such as his recent trip to Mexico. But the scariest part of the paper’s abandonment of Crux is that the vertical actually did get established, at least with readers. “We simply haven’t been able to develop the financial model of big-ticket, Catholic-based advertisers that was envisioned when we launched Crux back in September 2014,” McGrory wrote in his letter to staffers.Įighteen months is not a long time for any new venture to get firmly established. It was a big and fairly novel gamble for the Globe to try and fund its Catholic coverage through an ad-based revenue model. Most religion-specific publications that aren’t supported directly by a religious institution get their money from non-profits and donors- Tablet, for example, in the Jewish world.
“If you see the financial security of something like this resting almost exclusively with ad sales, that’s a very dicey proposition,” Allen said. Second, it was betting that there was an untapped market for advertisers who would want to be associated with this coverage-from Catholic hospitals and charities to companies that were looking to appeal to a specifically Catholic readership. Fresh off its Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation into widespread clergy sex abuse-an effort that was recently featured in the massively popular, Oscar-winning film Spotlight-the Globe anticipated a big local and national readership for in-depth coverage of the Church. First, the paper has been a leader in coverage of the Church, which is a huge cultural and political institution in Boston. How exactly we’re going to engineer that remains to be seen.”įrom the beginning, the business model the Globe envisioned for Crux seemed tenuous. So we decided, quite literally, to cut our losses and focus on the core of our business.” In a few weeks, the paper plans to turn the site over to Allen, who says he is “determined to make sure that Crux continues.
We made the words work, but not the numbers. It was a terrific idea, a noble mission, and very well executed by a small, deeply experienced, hard-working staff. In an email, McGrory wrote, “I loved Crux. In a letter to staffers, the Globe’s editor Brian McGrory announced that the paper is shutting down the vertical on April 1st, a move which will involve two to three editorial layoffs and one business layoff, according to a spokesperson. Eighteen months later, The Boston Globe has bailed.
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