UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter
Ken Briggs | Apr. 18, 2016
The Pulitzer Prizes were announced today, just weeks after the movie version of the Boston Globe’s prize-winning religion coverage won an Oscar and its highly touted experiment in full-blown Catholic reporting folded. That trial balloon, called Crux, was an enterprise edited by John L. Allen Jr., who left NCR to take it on. Four days after the Globe ended it, citing failure to attract enough ad revenue, Crux found a new home at the Knights of Columbus.
That outcome guarantees Crux’s financial survival. The Knights run a huge insurance company that generates revenue for a host of Catholic causes and is a principal funder of Vatican projects. Its embrace of a highly regarded Catholic news site adds to the agency’s stature and reach.
The question is what this does to Crux’s identity. It was begun by a national secular newspaper that had admitted kowtowing too much to the Boston archdiocese before exposing the shocking priest sex scandal in a series that won a Pulitzer. Allen, chosen to be its editor, arrived as a high-profile Vatican reporter and author with great energy and competence though often from a perspective that clearly advocated Catholicism and its central hierarchy.
So it was a somewhat uneasy alliance to begin with, the Globe hoping to run with its Pulitzer and movie successes to spur readership and an editor understandably eager to broaden Catholic coverage with the resources of a major newspaper. The partnership lasted 18 months, praised by the Globe’s higher-ups for its content, judged unviable by its revenues.
However unusual the journalistic arrangement, Crux at least could be held to its prevailing standards of objectivity and independence. Its very existence could be and was argued, but it was in place.
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