To the uninitiated, the National Catholic Reporter might sound like a newspaper run by the Catholic Church. In actuality, it’s an outlet that has long provided in-depth, independent coverage of one of the world’s most powerful institutions. Almost twenty years before the Boston Globe made a scandal about sexual abuse in the Church into major mainstream news—and thirty or so before Spotlight immortalized it in Hollywood—the Reporter broke open the broader story. The paper continues to cover the Church and its constituents, including around LGBTQ inclusion, climate change, racial justice, and international Catholic news. Of course, as a paper devoted to covering religious practice, it has its idiosyncrasies, such as its Global Sisters Report: an initiative for news on nuns.
The intersection of Catholicism and politics is an evergreen story, one that the paper has consistently covered. Now the Reporter has a new leader to help it navigate this terrain: James Grimaldi, who was announced as editor in chief last week. Grimaldi brings a long and illustrious investigative career to the Reporter; he won Pulitizers for his investigative work at the Washington Post and, most recently, at the Wall Street Journal. He’s taking over in the throes of an election cycle, at a moment when many Christian voters steadfastly support Donald Trump and Catholicism as a driving political force is making headlines, especially among young people on the right. (J.D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, converted to Catholicism in 2019.)
Last week, I spoke with Grimaldi about fostering more investigative work at the Reporter, the less obvious ways in which Catholic beliefs and Republican policies clash, and creating more coverage around the Church. Our interview has been edited for clarity and length.
FM: How would you describe the National Catholic Reporter? How would you describe its relationship with the Church?
JG: The National Catholic Reporter was founded sixty years ago by lay Catholics [the unordained, ordinary constituents of the Church] as a direct response to Vatican II [the council of Church leaders formed in the sixties to modernize the Church’s practice]. One of the goals of Vatican II was to have more laypeople involved and engaged in the Church. Our mission is not to promote the Church; there are other Catholic media organizations where they believe that is their mission. Our mission is to cover Church activities from an independent point of view. The purpose of our coverage of the Church and the wider religious, political, and social forces shaping public policies is to add to the public debate and general welfare of every human being. We’re Catholics writing about the Church, although we have non-Catholic writers as well. Throughout our history, it’s been a voice for the disadvantaged, the marginalized, those forced to live in the shadows. We hold authority accountable to the Church’s own values, morals, and ethics.
What does the landscape of Catholic media look like, and where does the Reporter fit in?
Forty percent of Catholic diocesan papers have closed since 2005, and the US bishops, in addition to that, have turned the operations of the Catholic News Service [the news agency formerly operated by the US Conference of Bishops] over to Our Sunday Visitor [a Catholic publishing company with a wire service], whose mission is to champion the Catholic Church. We’re not championing anything; we were not founded by an order, as some of the other Catholic media organizations were. For example, Eternal Word Television Network, which is much more conservative, was founded in a monastery in the south of the United States. [In 2019, NCR reporter Heidi Schlumpf reported a four-part series about EWTN’s massive media empire.]
There’s a lot that we can do to fill in the gaps and answer questions that might not be answered, not only because there’s less Catholic media, but because many of these small and metro-size newspapers no longer have religion reporters. They don’t have the money for it. Many of these communities can barely cover the city council. If they’re not covering the city council or the school board as well as they were before, you can rest assured they’re probably not covering the local Catholic diocese.
I think that many of the dioceses are not as transparent as they could be when they do things like close churches or end programs. There was a diocese recently that ended its immigration program [an initiative to welcome new arrivals to the US] out west; people in that diocese were very upset, and it wasn’t clear to me what the reasons were behind it. I think that asking those questions and finding those answers is very important for our readers, and for the public. You can’t apply a Freedom of Information Act to a diocese. You have to use old-fashioned investigative techniques in order to figure out what’s going on.
How are you planning to foster more investigative work at the Reporter?
It’s done a lot of very good investigative work over the years. We had a great story just a month or so ago about allegations against a parish priest who had an alleged sexual assault that happened. I also see us as having the potential to do investigative stories about systemic issues or big institutions where there could be either financial irregularities or ethical problems or questionable activities. We have several reporters who have already done quite a bit of it. We’ve got a couple of reporters who have done some deep exploration of the connections between money and conservative Catholics, and funding for political activities and support of the Trump candidacy, for example. That’s an old-fashioned money-in-politics story that’s been the bread and butter of my career. And I admire those stories, and think there are ways we can continue that coverage.
I also plan to bring in training. I’m a longtime trainer with Investigative Reporters and Editors. We will be doing training on the Freedom of Information Act, how to use court records, how to examine bankruptcy records. We have many dioceses in bankruptcy because of the sexual assault scandals, and I think we need expertise in covering bankruptcies. Coming from the Wall Street Journal, I certainly know a lot of people who could help train on that.
How does the NCR approach its political coverage? What’s on your mind for election coverage, and what do you think your audience needs at this moment?
In terms of money and politics, I don’t think I need to come and add to that, because we’ve got a reporter who’s already doing that really well. I say that as a reader, and now I’ll be his editor. We have an excellent national columnist, Michael Sean Winters, who writes about the campaign. It seems like every day his column is widely read; he’s very popular, he’s very smart, and he has an elegant way of marrying up political commentary with the ethos of Catholic social teaching. There’s also Brian Fraga and Heidi Schlumpf, who have done stories on this over the past couple of years; they did a pretty interesting piece about the funding behind what is now the Catholic Prayer Breakfast [a conference-type event that is advertised as nonpartisan but hosts organizers and speakers with “conservative Republican credentials,” as described by the Reporter], which is different from the National Prayer Breakfast. They followed this organization, the Napa Institute [a conservative Catholic group], and its funding.
I don’t want to give anything away, but I do have some ideas on how we can provide useful information not only to Catholic readers, but to political readers. We have a Republican vice presidential candidate who is a recent convert to the faith. We have two candidates [Vance and Tim Walz] who have crossed paths with the Catholic faith; that’s worth exploring. Also, there are many issues that are very prominent for the election coming this fall. A big one is immigration. We have one candidate [Trump] who’s made immigration a major element of his campaign, and the Catholic Church has very strong feelings about welcoming immigrants and deportation. So that’s something that we’re interested in and will cover.
How do you plan to reach more people outside of the Reporter’s audience?
A lot of our readers are on the progressive side of the political spectrum. I think they come to us for reliable coverage of issues that they care about. And it is a bit of a foil to some of the more traditionalist and conservative media, some of which is better-funded; not that we don’t have good funding, but there’s definitely, it seems to me, a lot of funding on the conservative side of that reporting. We’re a relatively small organization; we have forty people, but they aren’t all reporters. I plan to explore collaborations with nonprofit news organizations. There are some great ones out there that cover justice and healthcare and investigative reporting or local news. I could see us partnering with a local news outlet, be it the Baltimore Banner or the Houston Landing or the Voice of San Diego. I think we will have stories that they would be interested in collaborating on. That’s the way to leverage our readership and expand our portfolio.
Other notable stories:
- Yesterday, hundreds of simultaneous explosions occurred in parts of Lebanon where the militant group Hezbollah is known to have a strong presence, killing at least eleven people and wounding thousands more, according to Lebanese officials. The explosions seemed to have been caused by the remote detonation of pagers used by members of Hezbollah. Israel was quickly suspected of coordinating the attack; initially, confusion reigned as to how, but overnight, news outlets reported, citing anonymous officials, that Israel hid explosives in the pagers after Hezbollah ordered them from a Taiwanese firm. Israel has yet to comment on the attack; the Taiwanese company said that the pagers were made by a Hungarian firm under license, though, contacted by NBC, that company also denied having manufactured the pagers, calling itself “just the intermediate.”
- Yesterday, Harris sat for an interview with members of the National Association of Black Journalists, after missing the group’s convention in July. (Trump, memorably, did attend; Jelani Cobb wrote about the ensuing “fiasco” for CJR.) NPR’s Tonya Mosley, TheGrio’s Gerren Keith Gaynor, and Politico’s Eugene Daniels conducted the interview at WHYY in Philadelphia, and pressed Harris for policy specifics. Harris also sat down this week with Stephanie Himonidis, a syndicated Spanish-language radio host also known as “Chiquibaby.” The New York Times (which described the latter interview as “breezy”) reports that Harris is currently gearing up to do a greater number of interviews, though she is likely to focus on local and “nontraditional” outlets over major national ones.
- Over the weekend, Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak, of the Times, published a blockbuster story revealing, based in part on private notes and interviews with insiders, the highly influential role that Chief Justice John Roberts played in shaping a trio of Supreme Court rulings that ended up benefiting Trump and his allies in cases related to January 6. Now Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern argue that the story gives lie to the image of Roberts “as an affable centrist steward of the court’s reputational interests,” one “created largely in the press and played to the hilt by him.” The pair also reassessed how some of their own past coverage contributed to the construction of this impression.
- In surprising media-business news, the parent company of The Guardian, in the UK, revealed that it is in talks to sell The Observer—its Sunday sister paper, which it acquired in 1993—to Tortoise Media, a startup founded by a former BBC news director and a former US ambassador to the UK. The CEO of The Guardian said that a sale would allow it “to focus on its growth strategy to be more global, more digital and more reader-funded”; Tortoise, for its part, pledged to continue publishing The Observer on Sundays while building out its digital brand and making significant financial investment.
- And Slate is out with a new season of its hit narrative history podcast Slow Burn, focused on the period between 2000 and 2004 when Fox News “first surged to power and a whole bunch of people rose up to try and stop it.” When Fox launched, in 1996, “critics called it disorganized, incompetent, and laughably inept,” a preview for the first episode says. “But it wouldn’t be a joke for long. During the 2000 election, Fox News would captivate the nation—and just maybe change the fate of American democracy.”
