MASSACHUSETTS
Washington Post
By Julie Zauzmer March 11
If a Catholic news website could work anywhere, at any time, it should have been Boston this year.
With a wildly popular and frequently controversial pope who traveled to the United States for the first time this year, plus an Oscar-winning film treatment of the Globe’s own investigation into abuse by Catholic priests, the Boston Globe’s Catholic-focused site Crux had plenty to cover.
But on Friday, just 18 months after launching the site, the Globe announced that it was giving up on it.
Crux will continue, its associate editor John L. Allen Jr. vowed on Friday. The Globe gave Allen the site for free when it announced it was washing its hands of it. He says he will keep it going, along with the site’s Vatican correspondent Inés San Martín. But he hasn’t yet figured out who will fund it. And in the meantime, the site’s journalists — national correspondent Michael O’Loughlin, San Martín and Allen himself, who has covered the Church for almost 20 years — are all out of jobs.
“We lost our sugar daddy. We’re not shutting down. We intend to continue,” Allen said to the Post on Friday afternoon. “Big picture, it’s not really a surprise. I knew going in that it was kind of a novel venture for a mainstream outlet in the United States.”
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