We consider our audience a gift from God

If you’ve been around WORLD for a while, you know that we make our biggest appeal for charitable contributions in December every year.

You also know, even if you’re new to WORLD, that we rely on your contributions to do our work. We’re up front about this: Our readers, listeners, and viewers also are our most important supporters, and we are grateful for that. To maintain our independence, we can’t allow ourselves to depend on big advertisers, big foundations, big government, or a never-­ending chase for a bigger audience. All of those bring big temptations—and it’s hard enough to do honest reporting even without those.

We’re thankful, then, that you have been so generous all these years. You’ve made it possible to do more work and to do it better—deeper reporting, sharper analysis, and stronger programs. With your help, we are serving more individuals and families by providing more content on more platforms.

Here are just a few things your gifts made possible this year:

At the start of the year, we launched a newsroom-wide professional development program—our most robust ever. It’s already helping to stretch our reporting vision through a series of off-the-record briefings and workshops with high-level speakers addressing education, science, culture, ethics, and world affairs. These sessions allow our reporters and editors to engage candidly with leaders and thinkers shaping the news we cover. Like our other initiatives, this effort exists entirely because of your support.

As I noted here in the previous issue, this year we’ve seen tremendous growth in our newest program, The World From A to Z, viewed in more than 30,000 public school classrooms every day. That program is almost entirely donor-supported—we wouldn’t be doing it at all without your help.

At the beginning of the school year, we introduced a brand-new look for WORLD Watch, our daily video news program for families. This is our fastest-growing subscription service, and we hope it reaches many more young families in the coming year. Your contributions helped get that program off the ground, and they’ll help us reach new viewers.

World Journalism Institute—also funded by donors—­continues to train young reporters for WORLD and for dozens of other news and media outlets. WJI has become a unique supporter of journalism programs at Christian colleges and has expanded significantly in recent years. This year, that commitment deepened with the introduction of our yearlong jour­nalism fellowships, and our first fellow, a recent college graduate with a degree in economics and an alumna of WJI. She’s now gaining experience with the WORLD Watch team, representing the next generation of journalists your gifts make possible.

The WORLD and Everything In It, our daily news podcast, continues to grow and improve, even after more than a decade of production. Advertising covers only a small fraction of what it takes to produce the program. You provide nearly all the resources that make it happen.

And if you’re wondering, this magazine and our student magazines all benefit from your giving, too. Your subscription matters, and we’re grateful when you give gift subscriptions to friends and family. But even with those and limited advertising, your charitable support keeps these magazines vital and helpful.

We consider our audience—you, our readers, listeners, and viewers—a gift from God. He has called us to serve you, and we take that calling seriously. In an age when so many ministries rely on a handful of very large patrons, we’re thankful for the tens of thousands of ordinary believers who make WORLD possible. It’s not flashy, but it’s faithful—and it’s the kind of independence that keeps us accountable to you.

Thank you for praying for us, supporting us, and sharing our work with others. What a gift you are!