E119: Religion News Service

Rebecca Snyder sits down with Deborah Caldwell, CEO of Religion News Service, for an in-depth conversation about the evolving role of religion in American journalism. Deborah unpacks why religion reporting still matters and shares how local faith communities often act as vital civic infrastructure. She also explains how RNS bridges the gap between tradition and modernity. This episode offers a thoughtful look at how religion intersects with politics, community, and culture in complex and often surprising ways.

Chapters

• 0:00 Why religion still matters in the news
• 3:30 Reporting religion from local to national
• 11:10 Inside the mission of Religion News Service
• 23:45 Partnering with AP and NPR to expand reach
• 29:30 Meeting audiences where they are

Transcript

0:00

you Welcome. We're here today with Deborah Caldwell, who's the CEO of Religion News Service, RNS for short. So welcome to the program, Deborah. Great to be here, thanks. I wanted to just start off with sort of the importance of religion to news. mean, we hear so many stories these days or so many research that the rise of the nuns, N-O-N-E-S, m and how religion is becoming less a central part of the American life. But why is religion still relevant to readers? Well, on the national level, as we know, there's just so much talk about religion and politics. So we have uh religion being weaponized, often on the right. We have the rise of Christian nationalism and that uh movement is then uh tied into the Trump administration and to some of the members of the administration. On the left, Um, you have the religious the religious left essentially fighting the trump administration so you have the arrest in the last few weeks of william barber Um who uh, was arrested at the capitol for protesting? the administration And so it's important because it's it's being constantly discussed and and used by by both the left and the right in politics. Um And, you know, it's also important um on the local level because religious institutions are really civic infrastructure and a lot of local news will cover the school boards and the cops and the town council as they must. And that's really important. But when they are not covering what happens, you know, in religious institutions, they're missing a lot. um And I love when they're able to do that coverage because religious institutions are where the homeless get housed and where the hungry get fed. There are daycare centers run by religious institutions. know, AA, all kinds of things happen in religious institutions. And so it's important to be. love that idea that it's part of local infrastructure. And I do agree that that's so often overlooked. Certainly there have been, everyone flocks to religious institutions when there's scandals. When there's, I live in the Baltimore area and it's been huge in the news, not only some of the Catholic church scandals, but also the closing down of schools and things like that. but the everyday work of the church, no matter the denomination, it does provide a lot of infrastructure. So you've had a really long career in news media. And from your perspective, how should journalists approach that local infrastructure story through the lens of a religious organization? it? Does it need a different reporting structure, style, or touch to report on that infrastructure? That's an interesting question. I'll say a little bit about my career in coverage of religion and then I think that may inform how I answer the question. So I started my first job was actually in high school um where I reported on the high school for the local weekly newspaper and then once I graduated from college I went to a what this is really old people talk but the a 20,000 circulation six day a week paper um at which was by the way an afternoon paper. still, not even that old, but still these things still existed back then. And uh so, and that was in a local, a small community in Pennsylvania. And then from there I went on to a regional paper in Trenton, New Jersey, worked at the Trenton Times. From there I went to the Dallas Morning News. a more like a super regional paper. And then from there, I went to New York and was was and spent the rest of my career there and doing national news. But the first thing I did when I when I moved to New York was a uh Web 1.0 startup called BeliefNet, which was about religion and politics. So you do cover religion in different ways in different places. You know, I'll start with the small daily. I wasn't covering religion then I was actually covering schools and cops, but I were covering it. It would have been, you know, what is, what is a local religious institution doing? Because often there's, you know, there's small events that, um, that are important to a community. Um, or maybe there's a protest being organized, for one thing or another, um, by a religious institution or often. in small communities, the ministers and rabbis and now imams will often get together. And if they've got a particular civic issue that they want to raise up, maybe it's at the school board. um Those are tremendous stories, and they're really important to a community. um When I went to Trenton, that's when I actually started covering religion. I had been covering Princeton and Princeton University, and I was asked by the editor if I would cover religion. first I was a little scared. Yeah. you do? Did you always have a religious, like did you have a spiritual community? in it. I had been a religion minor in college and I had a lot of interesting religion in my growing up. It made it really interesting and appealing to me. And it was at the time in the 90s when the culture wars were really starting. And I could already see it happening on the regional level in New Jersey. after a little bit of, know, thinking I said yes. And it really turned out to be one of the best decisions I ever made. But to get back to the sort of local thing, and then I can connect that to the national, one of the best stories I think I ever did in Trenton from the point of view of knitting a community together was a story about a Presbyterian church, a synagogue, and a mosque. And this was in the early 90s that uh decided to do monthly dinners. So, and they rotated the dinners between the three organizations and they would, I think it was a potluck. And so the, every month they would go around and they would, on a Sunday night talk about, you know, stuff they didn't know about each other. And again, it still shocks me that this was the nineties. And again, it's New Jersey, so there's some more diversity there. uh But it was wonderful. I loved that story. I wrote that story. People were just thrilled that this was happening in their community. And that was actually before the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. When that happened, there was already a little bit of goodwill or slight understanding. among people in that region because they knew that there were these Muslims who were not terrorists, which, you know, it foreshadowed, of course, what came later. uh of like explainer uh series in some ways, like this is what's happening, this is what we're going on, but you're not building bridges in that kind of coverage at that point. Am I getting that right? of course, I was like out, you know, there were three mosques in the area. And again, by that point in 1993, so, but I had already made contact in that community and I had good, you know, good relationships with those people. So I was able to talk about, you know, their stories and, you know, their trauma over that, that event. And the reason it made a difference is because that part of New Jersey, there were still plenty of people who worked in New York. And so people who, you know, were either near the World Trade Center bombing or, you know, they just knew people. of course, again, it was eight years before the actual 9-11 happened, but it was, you know, it was a foreshadowing. But then in also in Trenton, the other thing that this is just interesting for people who are, you know, excavating religious right history is that uh I discovered that there was a group of people starting a Christian coalition chapter in south of Trenton in sort of South Jersey. And that was one of the early groups that was, you know, in their words, they said, we want to take over, that we want the Republican Party to take over um local, um anything from the school board on up to the town council all over the country. And that's which is such a long game when you see what's happening with, you know, Moms of Liberty going after school boards and like, that's a very, like that's a long-term playbook for sure. That was probably early, no, it might've even been early um 90s. So I discovered this, I was fascinated. So I went and interviewed this pastor, South of Trenton, and he told me all about what they were doing. And then I wrote the story. And the next day, Ralph Reed called me. He was very upset. And I said, well, that's what he told me. There was nothing. You gotta report on it, yeah. it. anyway, that a lot of it is just uh being, as we all are, journalists curious and seeing, um seeing patterns and seeing interesting people and interesting stories. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And so then on the national level, I wanted to talk more about what RNS does because there's a whole news service devoted to religion. And luckily, because those religion beats, you know, I don't think Trenton has uh a religion beat any longer. And so can you talk about what RNS is and how it um how that coverage can be used and maybe inspiring uh in different ways? Yeah, mean, thank you, because it's wonderful to talk about it. So RNS is a 90 year old news organization. We are a nonprofit. RNS was founded at almost very similar time period in 1934 when there was a rise of anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism and racism. The country was very divided. um The founder of RNS, a man named Louis Minsky, went to what was then called the National Conference of Christians and Jews in New York and said, 'I think a way to help people get along better is if they understood each other better.' And so he proposed this new service covering religion um and they funded it. So from then on, RNS, was covering, if you think about the 30s and 40s, it covered, even globally, covered the Holocaust, it covered the post-World War II period, the rise of the National Council of Churches, the World Council of Churches, it covered the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-apartheid movement, 9-11, all the way up, rise of the religious right, all the way up till today. So today we do still have the old fashioned, what we would consider a new service, like we used to be called the AP of religion. That does still exist, but it's much smaller. That syndication service is a smaller part of our business. Now we are mostly um a direct to consumer website. along with, and we have, we're on many platforms. So we're on, we have newsletters, we have podcasts, we are on all the social channels. And we also have uh partnerships, editorial partnerships with the AP and with NPR. So we share reporting and help them also cover religion. And then just to sort of say a little bit more about what we cover, we are national and to some extent international. news organization. So we have a Vatican correspondent and you may have heard that big news event that happened recently. So when we knew that Pope Francis was, you know, probably going to die and when he did, we had a Vatican correspondent who has covered Francis, you know, for years now, but we also sent a columnist and another one of our Catholicism reporters. to Rome. So they were there for the funeral and then the conclave and then the naming of our new Pope Leo XIV. So we definitely have international coverage that's really important. And we do have some freelancers around the world who cover important events around the world, but primarily for, you know, we are a national organization. So um We cover a lot of religion and politics, a lot. um and that seems to be in the polarizing world that we live in, religion is certainly not immune to that. In fact, it can be in some ways a driver. you know, tell me a little bit about sort of the juxtaposition of like the analysis of uh sort of the religion strands and how much you still have to do kind of the explainer things to even when we talk about all those nuns that are out there. I'm not sure that sort of the general public is like separating the strands of, you know, the split within the Methodist Church or what's happening in the Presbyterian Church or evangelical versus Baptist, you know, like all those pieces, and that's just Christianity, you know, like that's just a little thread there. But where do you, like when you look as an organization that started out to foster understanding, What does that look like in a world where people aren't as facile or not as familiar with religion, that it seems a little bit othered there? Do you have a stratagem? Yeah, that's really interesting question and we wrestle with it just to be completely honest. We have a uh very big audience of people who want the depth. They want the coverage they can't get elsewhere. They might get some of it in, you know, like the New York Times or the Washington Post and now perhaps NPR, but much of that kind of deep coverage that comes at it from a non-religious point of view, we're the only ones who can provide that. There isn't anybody else doing that anymore. oh So we do need to serve that audience that's very literate about, in this case, religion and politics, or simply religion itself. But a great example of this is also how do we cover minority? faiths, well, what we call quote unquote minority faiths. They are not as large numerically in this country, but they're not minority faiths enough in other parts of the world. So a great example is Hinduism. We're the only uh news organization covering Hinduism, like with a Hinduism beat. so covering that in the United States means you are doing a lot of explaining. because people have lots of the knowledge of what Hinduism even is. we're finding ways to make that more understandable to people who aren't religious at all or just don't even know anything about Hinduism culturally, except maybe yoga. So like last fall, and let me just say, we do cover a lot of Hinduism in depth, but one example of a way that we try to make religion accessible is last fall we did a piece on what's called Diwaliween. And it happened to take place in New Jersey, but I think it happens in other places where there are large Hinduism communities. So they combine Diwali and Halloween and it's a great moment of community. the two holidays happen around the same time. And so it's... Yeah, it's just a lovely, lovely little thing. But yeah, strategically, I'm not gonna lie to you, it's not easy. And I agree with you, there is a rise of, rise of, it's already here, know, more than, I think it's 28 % of all Americans consider themselves either secular or nones. Now the thing is, a lot of the people who call themselves that aren't necessarily completely, It's not like they know nothing about religion or, probably what we're really talking about here is Christianity because of the history of the country. But what they tend to be is people who just don't know that much or weren't really based in any kind of religious faith or just they're sort of broadly spiritual. And what we do try to do is cover things. in ways that would be interesting for someone who, and you have to be careful when you're broadly spiritual stories because then you have to be careful you're not straying into wellness culture, which is quite different. that's, yeah, that's an interesting line. Yeah. So I'm going to get this wrong, but a couple years ago, one of our reporters did a story on a, and I hope I may get this wrong actually, but I believe it was sort of a spiritual, um a place in New York that combined spirituality plus yoga and gave people a way into Hinduism, spirituality through yoga and helped them connect. those dots. we also another of our reporters in the last, say, year did did a piece on arise primarily in the Midwest in the south where Christianity is just, you know, there's just a lot more Christians, but also a lot of people who are not so thrilled with Christianity. So there's now church like organizations meeting on Sundays with, just with talking about broad spiritual things. um So it's, it's church-like. It's not, um but it doesn't contain any religion. And that there was, there's one in Atlanta, there's one in Pittsburgh. They're, they're sort of all over the place. But it makes sense that it's cropping up because I think if you take out a lot of the God stuff and leave the social justice issues, so many people can get behind that. It's the organized religion piece that people have a problem with. And many people do consider themselves very spiritual, if not, quote unquote, religious. And so what an interesting way that you have to kind of thread that needle of like cover religion, but there's this whole world of spirituality out there. And how do you make sure that your beat doesn't just suddenly become everything under the sun? And I want to stop for a second when you mentioned social justice, you sometimes hear, and maybe you've even heard this, social justice is really a buzzword for younger people. They really care about social justice, whatever that might mean to them. So I agree with you in some way that is their quote unquote religion, not all of them, but we have noticed that, that uh that's a real youth. movement and there is a crossover with religion. So really could be covering everything in the world at some point. So hard to stay in one's lane. yeah, it's hard. But remember, it's not just all of those things. Like we cover broadly evangelicals. And remember, the popular idea, the stereotype is of evangelicals all being MAGA people. That's absolutely not true. And those people don't get covered because of course, and I don't wanna even throw shade at my fellow members of the mainstream national media. It's not their fault. It's just they don't have time. They don't have the bandwidth or the resources to cover everything else. So that's where they're gonna go, because it's important. But we do cover broadly evangelicalism. um We cover broadly mainline Protestantism. We cover broadly Judaism. Obviously, I just mentioned Catholicism. And then, you know, plenty of other things too. And so I wanted to go back to earlier, I think maybe even before we were recording, or you had mentioned that you have partnerships with NPR and with some other, and with the AP. Can you talk a little bit about what those partnerships look like and how you're, because I believe that you're advising them on news coverage or maybe helping them brainstorm story ideas. What is that, what do those partnerships look like and what, uh how is that, how is that working to enrich coverage? both ways, because I am assuming that it's a two-way street. Yeah, I'll start with the AP partnership because that's been going on for maybe seven years now. It's been a while, six years. So at the time, AP only had one religion reporter for the whole global operation. Yeah, and they just, knew they needed help. And m through a circuitous, um sequence of events and I need to stop here and say I was not part of RNS then. I've been here for five years. So this predates me. But my understanding is that AP went to Lilly Endowment, which um is the funder of that partnership and said, we really would love your help figuring out how to cover religion. And so they said, well, funny you should ask because we fund something called Religion News Service. And so that's actually the wonderful way that that got started. But um what that means in practice is that we partnered for a while just helping them figure out what is religion coverage, what kinds of people do you need to hire, what are the stories and... And so for a while it was a lot of talking, a lot of thinking about coverage together. How are we going to, you know, what, what could we bring as, because we have the depth and the subject matter expertise and they have this incredible distribution network and the ability to write stories and, you know, do video and other things, um, with a, maybe the broader audience in mind. So. That's how that's worked. Now at this point, they have a full team. They've managed to hire over time. um so now what we do are sort of quarterly projects together. well, a couple of years ago, we did one on women and religion and looked at that broadly across the world and across all faiths. And we did those with co-by-lined. um But a lot of it now is we'll, will, they still meet together and discuss what they're doing. And then our stories, um not all of them, but we will have our stories go on their main national wire. um So it's a, it's a little bit more of a, they're distributing us and we're providing conversation and thought, thought partnership. The other one we have a relationship with is NPR and that one's new. that began to be operational in the fall, late summer, early fall. And that one is still uh working itself out. It's been really exciting for both of us. NPR for years has wanted um coverage of religion and it's never, they had one really spectacular religion producer. And that was it, a little bit like AP and they didn't have the bandwidth. And remember, they're also trying to not just uh cover the world, cover the, you know, cover nationally in the world, but they also are trying to help their member stations on the local level cover religion. And they didn't have an ability to do that. So our partnership now is that they were able to hire two people on their side. hired one to be the liaison. And so our reporters are now going on what they call two ways. Um, when we do a story that they, they want to have on their air, our reporter will go on and, and essentially report with like, tell them what we did and be interviewed. And we've also done some in depth, um, audio journalism with them, you know, gone and done like a seven minute feature for all things considered. So that's been, it's been a really, it's been really invigorating for us because we have discovered how wonderful it is to do audio journalism, how different it is from text journalism. And I, and everything I hear from NPR is that they really love it too, because they're giving their audience something that the audience has been wanting. So it sounds like in these partnerships, you're the thought leader, sort of you're the expert and your partners in some ways are distribution and sort of focusing the need for a more mainstream reader. Am I getting that right? In general, that's true. Although at this point, certainly AP has a lot of its own real true knowledge because they over these six years have been able to hire for that. again, their audience is a little different because it's a broader audience. in some ways it feels like capacity building too. mean, like you through that partnership, you've really helped them grow their own coverage. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, we have. um with NPR, it's a little too early to say how it will fully net out, but because we're on natively two different platforms, even though we both do have websites and text, you know, our expertise historically has been text and there's this audio. So there's a way that that just is wonderful because we really compliment each other. And I wanted to get into all the channels. You had said earlier that you have podcasts, you online, you have your wire service, you have now you have some audio channels. How do they all kind of mix together? Just on a logistical standpoint, it is so hard to feed all the beasts in the menagerie of the channels for news media. So what's your strategy and sort of how does it relate into your overall mission of getting that content out. I mean, to be honest, it's evolving. think it is for meaning the strategy of that. It's evolving for all news media right now. um You know, I think and I'm going to say something that is for any any younger journalist is going to sound really old fashioned and I completely I'm owning that the center right now remains the website because that's, you know, that's, we're still a text-based news organization. So the way we think about it, and again, completely recognize that this is old fashioned, is that what we produce um on a daily basis is it is, you know, there it goes onto the website. And from there it becomes newsletter uh material. And then from there, all of that is then, um, on, goes on every social platform you know of. that does include Tik Tok. We also have a Tik Tok channel that's, that's really gaining a lot of traction, um, and Instagram reels. So we have video that's beginning to really become more and more popular. And then really the podcast platform is it's a slightly different animal. Um, it. is more intimate, it's less journalistic, it's more, you know, it's just sort of like this. It's a conversation, all of the We Have Five podcasts and they all serve different niches, but they're not really specifically the journalism that R &S produces. It's, it meaning produces for the website. It's, that's its own platform. And so I think, you know, as I, as the publisher and the CEO, at this point, I think we need to figure out how to serve all the audiences that we have. That includes the endemic, you know, text-based, you know, deeply interested religion. We call them the religion nerds. em But, you know, we have loads of interests, know, politics junkies, news junkies. younger people who, especially younger women come to some of our podcasts. And I think at this point, it's really a matter of getting the journalism and that conversation out there to as many places as we can. And so then it seems like at this point, you're kind of going to be, it's not as simple as like, here is story A and we're packaging it for uh different formats. You're doing that with the newsletters and the socials with source items from the website. But then when you get into podcasts and partnerships, that feels like a really dynamic sort of conversational based that you're reacting almost in real time to. what you're hearing and like the inputs that are coming in. Is that? Well, that's I was listening to you. uh The other thing I will mention is that we've also in the last year started events. So that's another boom of journalism that's not interesting on a national. So how does that work when you do things nationally? And are they in person or? So we had one um event in person last September, and it was primarily to celebrate our 90th anniversary. And so it was a full day symposium and then a gala dinner and a lot of celebrating. But what happened was, oh man, did people love that. And we had so much demand to do it again that it was just, it was like overwhelming. And people, I mean, people were so grateful to be together and to talk about these important issues. you know, it wasn't like we were sitting around being like nerdy religion people or talking theology. It was talking like real time. We talked about AI and we talked about um lots of politics because you can't help it. And we talked about volunteering and we talked about interfaith relations after Israel Hamas. It's a lot of heavy stuff. And still people are like, we need more. So we're now planning another event for this year um in person and we will this time live stream it. And meanwhile, we are doing virtual events um about every month or two. um In fact, when the, after Francis died and they were in the middle of the conclave, we decided. Let's just do a pop-up. We called it the pop-up pope. So we did the pop-up pope event with our three reporters who were over at the Vatican. And we had like three days to pull it together and we had over 200 people sign up for it with almost no marketing. So yeah. and so was it just was it reporters just sort of talking or answering questions or? We had a moderator, um you know, asking the questions and them answering. And then as many virtual events are, had folks who were there, you know, putting their questions in the chat. And it was just a lot about, who could be the next Pope B answering questions about how does this all work? you know, because they have so much depth and knowledge of how a conclave works and how the papacy works. they were able to give a lot of background to people who may not have known it. So it sounds like it really just anyone, it was directed just towards the general public. wasn't sort of like the insider journalist to journalist piece. no, this was definitely the general public. And it feels like there's a real desire on behalf of the public to come out for things like this, to have these substantive conversations in kind of a neutral space because your religion news service, you're not coming at it. And because you applied journalistic principles to this work, because you're journalists, you're coming from an objective neutral space. So you can talk about the issues and talk about the strands. Yeah, I think that credibility is um our secret sauce. And the thing is, you can know that and you can intuit it. But when we saw it, um especially at our event last year, suddenly we realized, m because we're journalists, because that's where we come from, people believe us. They really think they can have an honest conversation with us. It was. and I love that idea of like that town square and that you're holding a framework for people to have conversations that they feel are vitally important. I don't think anyone thinks religion is not important. They may not feel called to it directly, but everyone in the U.S. can see that religion is shaping our society in ways that, you know, maybe they don't understand sort of the history or the background. And so that's where RNS, think, can be really invaluable. Yeah, and I think one thing we don't do that I think people would not find interesting is unless necessary, it's not like we're talking theology. Because that's what I think people think of. They're like, oh, God, I don't want to think about confession or communion or whatever. That's not what we're talking about, how religion intersects with society and also personally. We do plenty of stories about people's individual faith or people's, you know, how they're living as religious or faithful people. But we're just not talking about, you know, boring theology. Right, and yes, that's a confusing turn off for a lot of people. And I think it goes back to what you started with, which is thinking about religion as a local institution and covering it like a local institution. And you're doing that on a national level, but still covering it like a beat and having a team of reporters do that. I wanted, as we wrap up, I wanted to understand what you wish secular journalists would do maybe differently or do or think about when they're covering religion. Yeah. It's not as polarized as you think. Not everything is political. A lot of things are. I mean, we can't help it. We cover it. what people consider to be the evangelicals, for example, are not all the same. um And neither are mainline Protestants, neither are Jews, neither are Muslims. And so putting people into um into categories is really dumb and dangerous sometimes. um And I think that without that nuance that we're able to provide, um I think a lot of journalists are, they're doing their audience as a disservice. And again, I'm not really throwing shade at them because they're doing the best they can. And, you know, there's just so much to do and not enough time. um and there just aren't that many experts anymore. But I think, you know, we are here to help. We do try to help when we can. um But I think to try to remember that it's not everything is, you can't look at everything through a political lens, even today. Now, I think that makes sense. And then if people are interested in reading more of your coverage or maybe accessing some of your podcasts, how do people find you on that big worldwide web and in that huge Apple podcast list? What are some of your standouts that people should definitely check out? So our other website is you can either go to rns.org or religion news.com. And then our podcasts are all on everything. They're on Apple, on Spotify, et cetera. But you can also find them on the website and we have newsletters and m anything that we produce you can find and then, and you can find it at the website. And we are also on every social channel, as I said, even including TikTok and Flipboard and Apple News and Smart News. So we're everywhere. You're everywhere. And so how can uh sort of mainstream local journalists, are they able to access your content or are you able to provide, I know resources are limited everywhere, but the news service, the wire service aspect of that, is that something that anyone uh can access or how does that work? um Well, it's right now it's a it is a small business for us still and but we just don't we don't do a lot to to promote it, but if you do go to the website and look at the bottom of the website, there's a um On the footer there. I think you can click on it um and I think it says syndication, but I could be wrong and I'm there you can subscribe And we do have a sliding scale. So large uh media pay a higher price and smaller media organizations pay a pretty nominal price. And then if you do subscribe, then you as a news organization get our daily feed of articles and photos. Yeah. Well, I feel like there's so much more out there. feel like now I know who to call the next time there's a papal conclave. uh Right here, this gem. by that point, we'll be in the ether somehow. We won't be good snakes anymore. And I so appreciate you coming to talk with us. It's been really interesting to hear about the role of religion in news media and what you all are doing. So thank you so much for coming out. Thanks, it's been great.