An interesting inside-baseball journalism story with a Catholic angle:

G. Jefferson Price wrote for the Baltimore Sun for decades before he left in 2004. Upon his leaving, he entered into a relationship with Catholic News Service, in which he would travel to various CRS projects and write about them. These articles would be used in any number of places including the Sun:

After taking a buyout in June 2004, the former foreign editor and correspondent had been writing opinion pieces for The Sun under a pair of yearly freelance contracts. Since January 2005, he’s also been on the public relations payroll of Catholic Relief Services (CRS), the Baltimore-based humanitarian aid organization run by the U.S. Roman Catholic Church.

Under his most recent contract, The Sun has been paying Price $100 per column. CRS has been footing the considerably more expensive bills of Price’s travels to many of the world’s most dangerous and distressed locations—Uganda, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Haiti, among others—enabling him to report his observations and opinions in a newspaper with a proud heritage of foreign correspondence, but one in which exotic datelines from local reporters are increasingly scarce.

In exchange for CRS’s contribution to Price’s journalism (it also pays him a consulting per diem while traveling) the Catholic aid agency got to dictate where Price would go, with whom he would travel, and, at least to some degree, what he would write about.

And what Catholic Relief Services wanted Price to write about was Catholic Relief Services.

“The whole purpose of bringing Jeff on board was to help increase the awareness within the U.S. media about Catholic Relief Services and our work overseas,” explains Elizabeth Griffin, CRS’s communications director.

The conflict arose a few weeks ago because the Sun’s editorial page editor claims she just discovered that he was writing about CRS projects, without explicitly naming them as such. Price claims that the understanding he had with the Sun was that he could write about CRS, but not name them as CRS projects.

Price says he has no misgivings about the CRS-related stories he wrote for The Sun or any other paper. “I would not do anything differently,” he says. “It was important and still is important for me to maintain a reputation for integrity, so I would not write puff pieces for Catholic Relief Services . . . and that’s not what they wanted me to do.”

He intends to continue traveling with CRS and pitching newspapers with the stories he finds on his journeys. “What I do is write stories about people living on the darkest side of the earth,” he says, a day before leaving for East Timor on another CRS assignment. “It’s not as if I’m a lobbyist for some bad organization, for God’s sake.”

Thanks to Nancy Nall for passing it along.