NPR and 11 member stations have teamed up with the nonprofit news organization Religion News Service to boost coverage of religion.
The organizations have also staffed up: NPR hired a senior editor and senior producer to join religion correspondent Jason DeRose, while RNS added an executive editor to work with NPR.
The partnership launched over the summer and has already produced more than a dozen stories.
Two grants are helping fund the initiative. NPR is receiving a two-year, $900,000 grant from the Lilly Endowment. Meanwhile, RNS landed an Arthur Vining Davis Foundations grant for $300,000 over two years, according to publisher Deborah Caldwell.
“We’ve certainly learned and observed that for so many of the issues that have become kind of politically important in the last few years, there is a religious lens on many of them,” said Bruce Auster, NPR’s managing editor for collaborative journalism. “Faith, spirituality, religion intersect with so many of the things people care about in … civic life, and yet we felt like that lens was not getting due attention and that the way to correct for that was to really put some resources at it.”
In one example, an October story revealed Catholic bishops were donating less to anti-abortion campaigns than in earlier years.
That story took months of work and “shows the power of the collaboration,” Auster said. It was reported by RNS national reporter Jack Jenkins and Rosemary Westwood, public health reporter at WWNO/WRKF in Louisiana.
The other member stations participating in the collaboration are Public Radio Tulsa in Oklahoma; WDET in Detroit; WBEZ in Chicago; Colorado Public Radio; WPLN in Nashville, Tenn.; KMUW in Wichita, Kan.; WUNC in Chapel Hill, N.C.; Mississippi Public Radio; Northwest Public Broadcasting in Pullman, Wash.; and New England Public Media in Amherst, Mass.
“The idea is that you want to be doing reporting like this not just from Washington but hearing stories from on the ground,” Auster said.
The collaborators meet weekly to discuss stories and sourcing and to undergo training, Auster said. He said the aim is to create a new cohort of people who know how to cover religion.
“You’re not just trying to get stories on the air,” he said.
Caldwell said the partnership helps create more local and regional journalism about religion across the country and allows RNS’ reporting to reach a larger audience. In addition to collaborating on stories, RNS reporters are also interviewed as experts on the network’s radio programs.
“Coverage of religion is really important for helping people see that there’s a vibrant civic life in America,” Caldwell said.
NPR, meanwhile, benefits from the expertise RNS brings to the table, Auster said.
“They have, I think, sophisticated ideas about what stories could be,” he said. “They’re nuanced. They’re not the obvious stories.”