Catholic World News is celebrating its 10th birthday and in fine hobbit style is the one giving the gifts. You can get a $10 discount on annual subscriptions.
I’m proud to have been on the ground floor of CWN a decade ago. I was a grad student at Franciscan University of Steubenville at the time and a friend told me about a guy back in Massachusetts looking to hire a young Internet-savvy Catholic looking to get into journalism. It was a perfect fit for me. For the first year, I worked from out in Ohio as I finished my schooling. I remember that the daily package of stories went out by email to all the subscribers. And I mean that I was sending a mass email from my email software on my computer.
Our first web site didn’t come until some time later and I’m proud to say I designed it. There was nothing flashy about it and it was certainly not interactive.
Over those 9 years I worked for CWN, I’m happy to say that I helped break a lot of big stories, but the ones I think I’m most proud of are the small stories. I recall thinking early on that no other media outlets were covering the plight of Christians being persecuted in places like East Timor and the Great Lakes region of Africa or on the Indian sub-continent. Nowhere else were you getting regular reports of the persecution of Catholics in China and other places. I pledged from the beginning that I would try to give them as much coverage as possible so they wouldn’t be forgotten.
Phil Lawler has posted two special stories, for subscribers only, for this anniversary: The first is the inside story of CWN’s start and the second is a list of the All-Time Top 10 CWN stories.
