NCR breaks records, continues decadeslong news coverage in DC

Our 2025 numbers compare favorably to this time last year, when we had 4.4 million users, GM Hernandez says. While some of this traffic may be attributed to our coverage of the death of Pope Francis and the conclave that elected Leo, NCR's growth has remained strong since then. July brought our largest July audience on record, with 945,000 readers.

There's a good reason for increased interest in our work. As NCR board member Sr. Simone Campbell told me recently, our work has never been more important. Day in and day out, our journalists deliver world-class journalism that shines a light on the most important issues of the day — President Donald Trump's mass deportation plans, the Republican cuts to taxes for the rich and Medicaid for the poor, the growth of extremism in our culture and divisions in our Catholic Church over domestic politics.

Many of those stories emerge from Washington, D.C., where NCR has had a presence for decades. The first Washington Bureau office for NCR opened in March 1972, and this week we published one of the articles from our first full-time Washington correspondent, Rick Casey.

When he announced the new office on the tenth floor of the National Press Building, publisher Donald J. Thorman said, "The purpose of the new office is to strengthen and expand our coverage of both religious news and news of what is happening at the point where religion intersects with secular concerns."

"Since the Second Vatican Council, the parallel concepts of subsidiarity and decentralization have strengthened the institutional church's decision-making power at the national level. The U.S. Catholic Conference, the bishops' administrative arm [now the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops], is more than ever a place where news is generated and where information about what is happening elsewhere in the church may be obtained," he said.

This July, NCR moved out its office in the United Methodist Building across the street from the Supreme Court and the U.S. Capitol, where earlier this year Brian Fraga covered Supreme Court arguments and news editor Carol Zimmermann edited him. Last year, Camillo Barone wrote up his interview with Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker and Democrat from California.

But we haven't left the nation's capital. We have relocated to a space called Open Gov Hub, a co-work space with charitable organization members that support investigative news and do good works around the world such as work to protect the environment, combat global hunger, and keep government honest and open. I am working in the office, which will be used by our D.C.-based staff and visiting staff when they are in Washington.

Thanks to you, our readers and donors, for making these offices possible over the decades so we can keep you apprised of our government and bishops' activities — and keep them honest.

NCR's goal in D.C. has not strayed much from what Thorman, the publisher in the 1970s, outlined in 1972. The difference is that reporters don't need to be in D.C. as much as they used to, and they can report on these stories remotely (as Brian Roewe did with this scoop).

Thorman said the primary responsibility of the Washington office staff would be investigative reporting of the major issues, events, trends and personalities of importance to NCR readers, including governmental matters related to the newspaper's specialized news interests.

We're still doing that decades later.