The Catholic Herald is a venerable Catholic magazine, and I was honored to join them as a Contributing Editor earlier this year. I was so honored, in fact, that I wanted to do something to help boost the magazine in America. The promotional idea we came up was the Daily Herald, and the response has been enormous, far exceeding our expectations in terms of new readers, subscriptions, traffic, and recognition by other leading publications.
Originally I had suggested a brief “thought for the day” — or a Neuhaus-inspired “while we’re at it” — which seemed much more manageable than “a column a day.” But in the actual writing, I found that unpacking any concise thought I had took me the length of a column, and column-writing took me considerably more time than I anticipated. And I enjoyed it. Getting into the habit of writing every single day, interacting with readers, and other writers was a very good discipline for me.
