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Note: For a complete list of our current team, see the 30 photos at the bottom of this e-mail!

 

When I travel, I’m always surprised at how many people are shocked to learn not only how many tens of millions of people read LifeSiteNews every year, but also how many people it takes to make this global pro-life and pro-family news agency operate successfully on a daily basis!

For people who are newer to LifeSiteNews this may be the most important fundraising letter that you read during this campaign! I strongly encourage you to spend the five minutes to read it in full.

However, before I continue, I have to remind you that we have just 10 days left in our Christmas fundraising campaign – and we still have a steep $230,000 left to raise. Please, if you have not yet donated to our Christmas campaign, do so today!

With literally 3-5 MILLION people visiting our site every month, if everybody who read this donated just $5, we would hit our goal in a matter of hours! No amount is too large or small! Click here to donate!

Note: LifeSite is a 501c3 organization, and donations are tax-deductible in the United States

Many people are surprised – and delighted! – to learn that LifeSite now consists of a growing team of 30+ full- and part-time professional editors, journalists and support staff from all around the world! And that doesn’t even include other absolutely necessary contractors like our web design agency, lawyers, and accountants.

And thanks to this growing network of trained reporters in the United States, Canada, Rome, France, Mexico, New Zealand and Australia, we’re often able to cover many of the latest, breaking pro-life and pro-family developments from on the ground!  

Reporters like our new Vatican correspondent Jan Bentz, a seasoned, multi-lingual journalist who formerly worked for EWTN. Not only is Jan a fantastic and fearlessly faithful journalist, but over the years he has developed numerous high-level contacts within the Vatican walls – cardinals, bishops and officials who can provide us with the inside scoop on many of the most important events happening at the Vatican.

Jan is just one of several amazing new staff to join LifeSiteNews this year. Others include our new Washington D.C.-based reporter Claire Chretien, well-known pro-family activist Peter Labarbera, who also joins our reporting team full-time, our new U.S.-office business manager Rebecca Fidero, and our new assistant director of marketing, Doug Hanna!

These are exciting times at LifeSiteNews! With this incredible team, we’re not only on track to reach over 25 MILLION visitors this year with the truth about abortion, marriage, faith, family, and freedom, but we’ve expanded our social media presence to nearly 900,000 followers, and our e-mail subscribers to over half a million.

Meanwhile, our mission and reach are constantly expanding, as we identify needs and opportunities to spread pro-life and pro-family news to tens of millions more people. In the past few years, in addition to our core mission of news reporting, we have:

  • Launched LifePetitions.com, a groundbreaking pro-life and pro-family petition platform. (Already nearly two million people have signed petitions, helping to create concrete pro-life and pro-family change!)

  • Launched Faithful Insight, a 100% faithful, hard-hitting magazine aimed at high-information Catholic readers

  • Co-founded Voice of the Family, a network of over two dozen pro-life and pro-family organizations intended to defend traditional Christian teaching on the family

  • Founded the annual Rome Life Forum, a gathering of international pro-life and pro-family activists at the Vatican to develop a global pro-life and pro-family strategy

  • Created LifeFacts, a new section on our website where we are compiling the best research and information related to abortion and other life issues

But as LifeSiteNews has grown, so too have our needs! Thanks be to God, so far faithful supporters like you have always responded to our fundraising appeals generously  – and as we have grown, thousands of new supporters have come on board, thrilled to discover that there is a professional, expanding news agency that reflects their beliefs!

We are constantly pushing our journalists to go above and beyond – to resist the temptation to go the easy route taken by too many publications these days to simply cut and paste, or regurgitate  journalism from larger agencies.

LifeSite has developed personal relationships with hundreds of pro-life leaders and activists all over the globe who constantly feed us news tips and information. Our full-time and part-time, paid journalists then follow up investigate, research, and report on what they find.

In some cases, this means not just hours, but days, or even weeks of research – sometimes just to get to the bottom of a single story! In many cases, our journalists have quickly realized that the mainstream media got a story on our issues completely wrong, and by digging deep have been able to correct the public record – even forcing corrections from publications like the New York Times!

In some dramatic cases, such as the Development & Peace scandal in Canada, the Synod on the Family, the backlash against the sex-ed curriculum in Ontario, and our Catholic Relief Services investigations, our journalists have spent months digging through massive amounts of confusing information, making dozens of phone calls, writing numerous articles, and putting those articles through more revisions than I care to remember.

We constantly remind our journalists to “pick up the phone” – to go straight to the source, rather than relying on the Internet or other media. We routinely hold stories for days, simply because we haven’t yet been able to get a response from some important person or organization involved, and we’d rather get the story right, than be the first one to report on it.

Oftentimes, the investigation we must do, and the reports we must write are difficult. But when no one else is willing, or able, to report on the issues that most drastically affect life and family – we know you count on LifeSite to report those hard truths.

And because of our dedication to truth, and putting in the time and resources necessary to get all the facts related to the issues we cover, we have become the #1 most-read pro-life site on the Internet.

This isn’t a position we take lightly. Rather, we are humbled by the role we play in the culture war, and we approach our work as missionaries – not as employees with a job to do. And every penny we raise through your support goes back into our reporting.

Our journalists work from home, with salaries more befitting missionaries, but justice requires that we try to pay them enough to raise their families.

People are constantly amazed when they learn more about the scope of the work we do, and just how comparatively little funding we require to do it. But we are only capable of this because of the generous support of our readers, just like you!

This Christmas, we are hoping that you will help us to reach our absolutely minimum campaign goal of $300,000 before December 24th.

 

The LifeSite Team:


Steve Jalsevac,
President, Co-Founder

John-Henry Westen,
Editor-in-Chief, Co-Founder

John Jalsevac,
Managing Director, Vice President of Marketing

Patrick Craine,
Managing Editor
 

John F.,
Vice President of Advancement

Andy Parrish,
Public Relations Director

Doug Bean,
Associate Editor

Pete Baklinski,
Journalist
 

Peter LaBarbera,
Journalist

Lisa Bourne,
Journalist

Claire Chretien,
Washington, DC Correspondent

Clare Maagad,
Advertising Manager
 

Meghan Mulherin,
Development Assistant

Doug Hanna,
Assistant Director of Marketing

Rebecca Fidero,
U.S. Coordinator

Lianne Laurence,
Journalist
 

Stephen Weatherbe,
Journalist

Elisabeth Fritz,
Executive Assistant

Rebecca McMahon,
Development Assistant

Elizabeth Morgan,
Development Assistant
 

Jan Bentz,
Rome Correspondent

Anthony Esolen,
Blogger

Fr. Mark Hodges,
Journalist

Natalia Dueholm,
Special Correspondent
 

Theresa Hambleton,
Assistant to the Managing Editor

Matthew Hoffman,
Latin America Correspondent

Michelle Kaufmann,
Special Correspondent

Andrew Smith,
Special Correspondent
 

Jeanne Smits,
Special Correspondent

Jonathon Van Maren,
Blogger