A reflection of gratitude

This is the final issue of WORLD Magazine for 2022, and the ninth since a major revamp of the magazine led by a new executive editor and a new editor with an almost entirely new reporting team.

That’s not all our editorial team did this year, though.

I told you back in May about the restructuring of WORLD’s editorial function to work better across all our content platforms—magazine, ­digital, and podcast. That was a big undertaking that is now largely complete, but as we were going through it, we knew there were no guarantees of success. There’s always more to do, and we expect a lot of tweaking as we go, but we’re happy with the way things are working now.

All of that work was conceived and directed by our editorial council, the six editorial members who are just now completing their first year of ­service as council members. During the year, they beefed up the daily news team that produces The Sift newsletter (thesift.org), which led to an entirely new effort to provide top-of-the-hour, three-minute Sift newscasts to hundreds of radio stations. If you’re not a radio listener, you can access the most up-to-date edition of The Sift on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

The editorial council members also oversaw the 1-year-old WORLD Opinions project, which has produced the Biblically sound opinion for readers and listeners that we hoped it would. They created WORLD’s Global Desk, an effort to bring more structure to our international reporting. They strengthened our nine weekly Roundup newsletters. They helped instruct World Journalism Institute students. It was a busy year.

Speaking of WJI, along with our college and mid-career courses, our team held the first WJI Europe in Krakow, Poland, in August. We’re planning more in 2023 and expect to hold two international training courses.

This year was a busy one for our student news division, too. That update will need another column.

Those are the big pieces, but there are dozens of smaller projects I don’t have room to list. In light of it all, I can’t help but be grateful to God, our audience, and our team here. God provided everything we needed, He called us, and He was faithful.

You provided, too. Your subscriptions and gift subscriptions, your contributions, your word-of-mouth support, and your prayers—all of these are necessary for our continuing work. Thank you.