History

Worldwide Faith News (WFN) is an official news release database project on behalf of faith groups around the world. It was originally administered by the Communication Commission, National Council of the Churches of Christ, in the USA and is now maintained independently.

The posting of news releases and other documents is open to all world and national faith group organizations and is not limited to members of the National Council of Churches.

Begun on December 24, 1995, WFN serves as a global archive resource containing news releases, policy statements and other official documents from national and global faith organizations, denominations, ecumenical agencies, and other groups. It was originally designed to enable users to browse headlines of documents, search the full text of all documents in the archive, and subscribe to a mailing list for all documents as posted.

WFN is intended to be a resource for journalists, academics, religious leaders, clergy and lay people. It is available without charge to Internet users. All documents posted may be reproduced or quoted based on the permissions displayed at the bottom of each page.

Origins

1986

Beginning in 1986 the users of Ecunet, the ecumenical computer network, watched the growing database of news releases and other resources in Ecunet's denominational and agency news release meetings.

1992

In October 1992, during the Ecunet/CamCon IV (Computer Applications for Ministry) conference in Dayton, Ohio, a number of models for wider access to the news databases were explored. The National Council of Churches (USA) Communication Commission began studying means of making a global interfaith news release database available to journalists, religion leaders, university and seminary faculty and others.

Note: The original project name, Global Ecumenical Newsroom (GEN), was changed to Worldwide Faith News as more inclusive of world faith groups

Feasibility Study

1994

In 1994 a feasibility study funded by the Trinity Grants Program of was conducted. It included interviews and/or surveys with the following groups of people and other resources: journalists (religion writers and secular), journalism school faculty, news directors for denominational and ecumenical organizations, Usenet newsgroups, mailing lists, journalism and Internet related publications, WWW sites and site developers.

Among the religion organizations surveyed were national and global denominational news offices, the Christian Council of Asia, World Council of Churches, Consejo Latinoamericano de Iglesias, and the South African Council of Churches.

1994 Study Findings

  • A quantum shift in the training and qualification of journalists in CARR (computer assisted research and reporting) and the use of rapidly evolving Internet tools and resources for research.
  • Strong immediate interest on the part of journalists and news directors in some form of "religion wire" on the Internet; particularly a searchable full text online database consisting of news releases, policy statements and other documents.
  • Strong immediate interest among the news and communication directors of denominations and religion organizations in making their news releases and other documents more widely available on the Internet
  • An exponential increase in the number of government, corporate, non-profit and other organization Internet sites, providing news release resources, online databases, and audio and video clips.
  • A global proliferation of millions of websites, among them many denominational and faith group official and "unofficial" home pages.

A Significant Beginning

1995

Worldwide Faith News opened online eighty-nine years after the first radio broadcast in the world.

The first extended broadcast of the human voice was transmitted through the air on December 24, 1906 from Brant Rock, Massachusetts. A Canadian engineer, Reginald Fessenden, had worked for Thomas Edison in his New Jersey Laboratory, and later became a professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

Fessenden was convinced that the "wireless telegraph," which then carried only the sputtering dots and dashes of Morse code, could carry the human voice. The most common use for wireless at that time was communication with merchant ships at sea, directing them to ports where the cargo would bring the best price. The shipboard wireless operators were called "Sparks."

An account by Fessenden's wife, Helen, reports his historic transmission, as the Sparks on ships across the Atlantic heard what they had dreamed about — and thought impossible.

"...a human voice coming from their instruments — someone speaking... Then a women's voice rose in song. It was uncanny! Many of them called their officers to come and listen; soon the wireless rooms were crowded. Next someone was heard reading a poem. Then there was a violin solo; then a man made a speech."

The broadcast historian Eric Barnouw in, A Tower In Babel: A History of Broadcasting in the United States, reports that Fessenden himself played Gounod's O, Holy Night on the violin. He also read from the Christmas story from the biblical book of Luke and played a phonograph recording of Handel's Largo.

Recognizing that historical event, Worldwide Faith News opened on the Internet eighty-nine years later on December 24, 1995.

The WFN Design

General principles

  • WFN provides free access for any Internet user, following the evolving Internet access protocols.
  • It does not carry the identity of any single organization.

1995-2011

  • The initial 1995 Internet site was leased from a ISP vendor, with an appropriate suite of server tools including gopher WAIS, the Verity search engine and a Majordomo mailing list server. Graphic and plain text interfaces were available. Three possible ISP vendors were identified during the feasibility study. All were non-profit organizations. The Institute for Global Communication (IGC) in San Francisco was selected as the vendor for initial WFN development.
  • The wfn.org domain served as an official news release archive for the participating organizations.
  • WFN was initially designed with the Verity search engine to meet the expectations of journalists and other researchers by following the standards of existing commercial, governmental and other sites on the web.
  • The WFN home pages had links to the Internet sites and official home pages of participating denominations and faith groups. They in turn had links to WFN for news resources. National and international faith group and denominational sites were expected to grow rapidly.
  • WFN provided a global mailing list religion "news-wire" carrying releases from all participants, using a Majordomo mailing list manager. A series of other mailing lists were considered based on topics, denominations, organizations. Multilingual service was included in the design including English, German, French and Spanish.
  • WFN was designed as a low maintenance system and does not provide any form of editorial service. Documents from participating organizations were indexed, forwarded to the Majordomo mailing list server, and archived exactly as received.
  • The news release document archive was maintained automatically. It was full text indexed daily to include each day's additions. Full text searches originally used the ht://Dig open source search engine and later moved to using Google News Search.
  • The 2005 NCCC article "WFN – Ten Years Old and Googling Up a Storm" celebrated WFN's first 10 years and high presence on Google.

2011 to present

  • In late 2011 and early 2012 WFN transitioned to serve as a news aggregator, gathering and displaying news from faith groups via RSS feeds.
  • The RSS-based version of WFN provides a link from WFN directly to the original full text news story on the faith group’s website. Full text stories published since the transition are not stored or indexed on the WFN site.
  • Images from the original story may display on WFN if the originating site permits it.

Management of WFN

Initially, the NCCC Communication Commission managed WFN in consultation with the WFN Advisory Group, as administrator of the start-up and development grants from the Trinity Grants Program of Trinity Church (Episcopal) in New York City.

The WFN Advisory Group of participating denomination and agency representatives then took on a larger role. An initial meeting was held May 22, 1995 during Ecunet '95 Conference in Baltimore. The group met twice each year following that meeting for approximately 15 years. The Advisory Group developed news release style sheets, a WFN standards and practices document, and membership policies.

Since 2011, George Conklin, WFN Project Director and one of the original founders, has kept WFN going with website support from Cam Howard.

Funding

The feasibility study was funded by a grant from the Trinity Grants Program. A second grant from the Program provided the costs of the initial WFN system design, vendor selection and start-up expenses. WFN is particularly appreciative of the support and advice of Odessa Elliott of the Trinity Grants Program.

In-kind support was provided by the NCCC Communication Commission and other participants in WFN. The initial funding supported 12-18 months of operation continuing through 1998. After that the low maintenance costs were designed to be shared among the participants on an equitable basis.

NCCC ended it's financial support in 2011. From 2011 to 2018, the site was funded by George Conklin with in-kind support from Cam Howard. Since 2018, the site has been funded by Cam Howard with in-kind support from George Conklin.