John Allen writes about his move to The Boston Globe

From NCR today: 

Primarily, I’ll be doing the same reporting and analysis I’ve always done, but I’ll also be helping theGlobe ramp up its overall Catholic coverage.

One footnote in response to a question some have asked: I won’t be moving to Boston but will continue to divide my year among Rome, Denver, and road trips for reporting and speaking gigs.

I am inexpressibly grateful to the National Catholic Reporter not only for the classy way they’ve handled this transition, but for 16 years of unfailing support both professionally and personally. NCR will continue to be a go-to destination for reporting and analysis on the Catholic beat, and while I’ll no longer be writing for the paper, I will certainly be among its most avid readers. I want to take this chance to encourage All Things Catholic readers to do the same, even if as of Feb. 1, you’ll have to go to the Globe to get my own stuff.

In the meantime, I’m still in the saddle for NCR until the end of January, and I’m going to try to make the most of my last couple of weeks on the paper’s payroll in Rome.

Second, I did a quick interview with the Catholic News Agency on Wednesday in which I said I hope our project at the Globe will offer an example of how to get coverage of the church right in a major secular news outlet. While getting the story right is obviously the idea, in retrospect, I can see how the comment rankled with people who have been doing precisely that for a long time and hardly need me to show the way.

I apologize if anyone already felt what I said was a slight to their work because that’s certainly not what I had in mind.

There are many talented reporters on the religion beat and many news organizations with a proud record of groundbreaking religion coverage — including, of course, the Globe itself, long before I got there. My modest hope is to add to the good work that’s being done rather than blazing a trail where no one’s ever gone before.

Read more. 

Meantime, from his interview with CNA: 

“What I really hope we can accomplish is to offer a model of what serious coverage of the Catholic Church will look like in a major secular news outlet,” Allen said in a Jan. 7 conversation with CNA.

“Fundamentally, what I hope is that this will lift up an example of what getting this story right would look like, so that in the end it’s not just The Boston Globe doing it, but I hope it has a kind of leavening effect in the media business generally.”

Allen said he will fundamentally “continue to do the kind of reporting and analysis on the Vatican and the Church that I’ve always done,” and that his role as editor will largely be part of a “ramped-up” coverage of the Church by the Globe.

“I’ll be guiding, quarterbacking that in some sense, but the primary thing is, I’m going to continue to be a correspondent in the field,” he added.