The big view of WORLD

This column is in its 10th year, and in that time the WORLD family has grown—especially in recent years. So, over the next few issues, I’ll step back and offer a wide-angle view: what WORLD does, how the pieces fit together, and what holds it all in place.

WORLD is a news organization. We cover the news—and we train Christian journalists to cover it, too.

With regard to our news coverage, we primarily are reporters. We aim for in-depth, original reporting whenever possible. To supplement our reporting, we offer analyses and opinions that help our audience understand the news from a Biblical perspective.

We don’t do advocacy journalism or public relations. There’s a place for that, but it’s not our calling.

We cover the news for two broad demographic groups: adults and students. By reaching those two groups, we serve whole families—even extended ones. We think of families as our primary audience.

For students, we publish God’s WORLD News, a series of age-appropriate newsmagazines with extensive digital offerings including video, teaching guides, interactive quizzes, and newsletters. The series includes God’s Big WORLD (ages 3-6), WORLDkids (ages 7-10), and WORLDteen (ages 11-14).

Also for students, we produce WORLD Watch, a daily 10-minute video news program designed for Christian families and Christian-school classrooms. And we produce The World From A to Z, another daily 10-minute video news program, but this one designed for public-school classrooms.

For adults, we publish WORLD Magazine, in which you are reading this column (in either the print or digital version). Because the magazine is now monthly, we have moved our time-sensitive reporting to WORLD Digital, which includes our website and our email newsletters. The website (wng.org) also contains the digital version of the magazine, of course, and it is the home of WORLD Opinions. Our email newsletters cover topical areas of the news and are written by the WORLD reporters who focus on those areas.

Finally, there’s WORLD Radio, the producer of our daily news podcast, The World and Everything in It, and the seasonal long-form podcast Doubletake. You can find those, as well as our full podcast archive, by searching “WORLD Radio” on any platform like Apple Podcasts or Spotify or visiting wng.org.

We train Christian journalists through our World Journalism Institute (WJI). Historically, that training has focused on journalists at the start of their careers—most of whom go on to work at outlets beyond WORLD. Increasingly, we have been building ongoing training programs for the development of our own journalists throughout their careers.

That’s a quick summary of WORLD’s major programs. There’s much more to say about each of them, but I had to leave out a lot of fun stuff just to get it into one column. More next time.

I’ll share more about our business model in a future issue, but I do need to mention here that we absolutely rely on charitable contributions from our readers to do what we do. I need to mention that now because the month of June is the end of our fiscal year, and it is one of the two months during the year (the other being December) that we ask you to donate. A contribution this month helps us plan—and dream—about what’s next.