In January, following the killing of Renee Good and the Minneapolis protests, Religion News Service (RNS) reporter Jack Jenkins got a tip that he needed to return to Minneapolis to cover a training for more than 600 faith leaders from around the country.
“He was the only reporter from the mainstream press who was there,” said Director of Editorial Initiatives Pam Kruger. Jenkins covered the conference, which included a mix of activist training, spiritual revival and direct-action protest, and other events in Minneapolis: Clergy looking for ICE and Rt. Rev. Mariann Budde leading protests.
RNS, a member of the Institute for Nonprofit News, was recently awarded $1 million in grants to launch An Atlas of American Belonging, a multimedia news hub focused on faith and immigrant communities. This grant, provided by the Henry Luce Foundation, allows RNS to double down on coverage that they are already doing, and really expand and deepen it, said Kruger.
“The Atlas of American Belonging is really about looking at how belonging has been claimed in America over time, how it’s been denied and how it’s been contested. The Atlas will enable people to make connections between stories and see trends that maybe an individual story wouldn’t necessarily point to,” said Kruger.
RNS recently announced that El Paso Matters, also an INN Network Newsroom, will be a partner on this project, said Kruger.
Immigration coverage is a key area for El Paso Matters, said Robert Moore, the president and CEO of the newsroom, which covers El Paso, Ciudad Juárez and neighboring communities. Moore said that Religion News Service reached out to him about this partnership, viewing El Paso as an important location to include in its faith coverage.
“I think it’s really important to understand that, especially in the last year or so, the U.S. Catholic Church has become one of the leading institutions in pushing back very hard on the Trump administration’s mass deportation and mass detention programs.”
Robert Moore, President, El Paso Matters
“We have deep roots in Mexico, which means we also have pretty deep roots in Catholicism. I think it’s really important to understand that, especially in the last year or so, the U.S. Catholic Church has become one of the leading institutions in pushing back very hard on the Trump administration’s mass deportation and mass detention programs. We haven’t done a lot of reporting on faith and religion, and where we have done it, it’s around these immigration issues. This partnership allows us to use our local expertise and pair it up with their expertise on religion.”
The partnership between RNS and El Paso Matters will be resource-based – collaborating on reporting or using RNS’ editors to help finetune the reporting. Moore explained that he believes this partnership will let the newsroom do stories they want to do, and “just do it with a little bit more support.”
While stories about immigration and faith are constantly being produced by RNS, the multimedia hub is currently in the works with a goal of having it launched in some capacity by the summer, Kruger said. RNS is also continuing virtual events like the one they put on in January (On the Ground in Minneapolis: The Faith Response).
Kruger said that RNS has the ability to partner with another newsroom on faith coverage in their communities for an Atlas of American Belonging. Newsrooms interested in this partnership can reach out to Kruger.
