- Religion News Service
Religion News Service (RNS) & Interfaith America
Deepen your understanding of religious expression and develop skills specific to covering religion, belief, faith, and spirituality.
Applications Closed
This fellowship helped future religion news journalists develop their awareness of the impact of faith on politics and culture by deepening their understanding of religious expression and developing skills specific to covering belief, spirituality, interfaith cooperation and civic pluralism in America. The program supported five reporting cohorts, including 18 fellows whose stories appeared on RNS, Interfaith America Magazine and in RNS subscriber publications.
Applications are open to all journalism graduates who have completed their degree in the past three years, and to freelance reporters and storytellers in interfaith spaces who may not have a journalism degree but have at least a year of relevant reporting experience. This fellowship is only open to people living in the United States.
Fellows will pitch stories during monthly editorial meetings and work under the guidance of RNS editors to edit and publish them. The stories will be published on the RNS website and, as relevant, on the Interfaith America Magazine site. Fellows are expected to produce at least one in-depth feature story per month.
To receive the fellowship certificate, fellows must have published at least four feature stories by the end of the fellowship and attended all monthly editorial meetings, the two in-person convenings, and guest speaker sessions.
The fellowship runs from September 2025 to May 2026.
Fellows will travel to Chicago for an in-person convening in the Fall of 2025 and to the annual Religion News Association Conference in the Spring of 2026.
A $4,200 stipend, workshops, and sessions with renowned religion reporters from across the nation, one-on-one mentorship with RNS and Interfaith America Magazine editorial teams, opportunities to attend editorial meetings and network with reporters and editors in the field, and two fully paid trips to the Religion News Association Conference and a writing workshop in Chicago.
Receive IA’s funding opportunities, resources and latest articles in your inbox!
