Despite a glut of media sites vying for clicks in the Internet marketplace, two religious entrepreneurs believe there is a need for an online news source that provides a place for conservatism’s major factions to come together.
Evangelical religious broadcaster James Robison and Catholic author Jay Richards on Wednesday are unveiling the Stream, an online news site that promises to offer both syndicated contributions and original news analysis.
“There’s a problem in America for people on the Right because many of them are simply fragmented and don’t play well together,” Richards told the Washington Examiner media desk. “The Stream offers that cohesion. It’s a response to the fragmenting.”
Richards said, “The inspiration for the Stream actually started from a collaboration that I had with James Robison. We started collaborating in about 2010. We got together from different worlds: I’m a Catholic and I’ve been mostly in the think tank world, and he’s a popular former evangelist and [television] personality.”
Robison is primarily associated with his Christian relief group Life Outreach International and his LIFE Today television program. He envisions the Stream as “a national daily where those concerned about our nation’s perilous course can gather for news, wisdom and inspiration, and not feel as if faith must exist only on the margins.”
The Stream will be “covering and commenting on everything from breaking news and entertainment to family issues, religion stories and the great outdoors. It’s all God’s, and the Stream will wind through it all,” he said.
Richards, a Clinical Research Professor for the School of Business and Economics at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., said he and Robison believe conservatism in the United States has a unity problem.
Shortly after collaborating on the book together, Indivisible: Restoring Faith, Family, and Freedom Before It’s Too Late, Richards and Robison hit on the idea of launching a news site that could cater to conservatism’s multiple factions with what they hope will be original and insightful content.
“We’re trying to find that common, philosophical platform to articulate a common set of themes and to create a platform, intellectually speaking,” Richards said.
Besides his work at the Discovery Institute, he is also a contributing editor of the American magazine at the American Enterprise Institute, a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a research fellow and Director of Acton Media at the Acton Institute.
The Stream is organized as a nonprofit. Richards said the Stream will not carry advertising, at least initially.
“The Stream is being gestated within Life Outreach International, which is a 501c3; but The Stream will be spun off as its own 501c3, since it is a media outlet,” he said. “We’ve benefitted tremendously from the human resources and technical expertise at Life Outreach in the startup phase.”
He stressed that the Stream is not “a political or partisan platform,” but that it’s “an intellectual and philosophical platform. This is not an attempt to create a political constituency. The people involved in this are not activists.”
“The Stream will do legitimate news. We do have a philosophical perspective that we’re quite upfront about, and really part of the philosophical perspective is to try to tell the truth and be fair with even those people we disagree with,” he said.
“So rather than pretending there will be some sort of vague neutrality, we admit our philosophical principles upfront, then commit to our readers that we will be as honest and careful as we can.”
The Stream will feature syndicated columnists, including Jonah Goldberg, Cal Thomas, Charles Krauthammer, Thomas Sowell and David Limbaugh, straight news reports and analyses written by its staff and content from wire services like the Associated Press.
“We’ve got detailed contributor guidelines for our original contributors,” Richards said. “For instance, they don’t use ad hominem arguments and are to avoid bombast. We’re here to give fair analysis.”
“In terms of original commentary and analysis, the goal is to have it be as fair as we can be,” he said, adding that if the site’s editors “feel that a piece is too partisan or too activist, we won’t necessarily run it.”
The Stream currently has seven editors, who also write original material, and expects to add three more this week. The plan is to add three full-time reporters, a full-time art editor and a web producer in coming months.
The goal, Richards said, is to have a staff of roughly 20, including writers, editors and correspondents, by the end of 2015, with “some in Texas but most distributed around the country.”
Among Stream’s current writers are Rachel Alexander, former editor of Western Shooting Journal, and reporter Tom Sileo, who is a five-year veteran of CNN and a syndicated columnist.
“There are thousands and thousands of sites that aggregated news of some sort,” Richards said. “News sites and interesting aggregators; even a well-curated Twitter feed. What, exactly, can we do that’s different?”
“Part of the Stream is to create a constituency that’s not there right now. Our perception is that you just look at the demographics, for instance, you can see it in magazines, newspapers and organizations that cater to, say, Catholics or evangelicals or basically faith, and they do it in a very segmented way.”
“There’s nothing that quite intentionally set outs to build a common platform that brings all these different constituencies together,” he said, “and this is part of our own personal analysis.”
He said that although conservatives account for a large part of the population, there’s a reason they feel marginalized on campuses, by media and the entertainment industries.
“A lot of conservatives wonder, ‘Why is it that there are so many of us, in terms of basic demographics, and yet we have so little influence in most commanding heights of culture, whether it’s media, academia, or entertainment?’ ” he said.
“We shouldn’t be surprised in many ways that we’re being squeezed out of the public square as many of us have not been very good at presenting a common and winsome public witness in unity. And that’s what we want to do: We want to appeal to many, many constituencies, but we also want to create a constituency that has not been there before,” he said.
