The Texas Tribune is an all-digital nonprofit news organization based in Austin. Focused on Texas policy and politics, the Tribune uses every storytelling tool its staff can find (or invent) to report the news in this fast-growing and rapidly changing state.
Ambitious interactives, innovative multimedia pieces, continuous free and public events held year-round all over the state, a major politics and policy festival every fall, a steady and constant offering of livestreams of both our events and news as it happens — all join with aggressive daily reporting and big enterprise efforts to engage and inform our readers.
This past year has been action-packed even by the Tribune’s energized standards. In late June, amid legislative wrangling over women’s health issues, state Sen. Wendy Davis staged an 11-hour filibuster of an omnibus abortion bill — a move that catapulted her, and, as it happened, The Texas Tribune — into the national and even international spotlight.
Following lengthy negotiations with the state, the Tribune had begun offering live, gavel-to-gavel video of the Legislature. Gripping, suspenseful drama was hardly the norm. But on the night of the now-famous filibuster and its raucous conclusion, the audience swelled to hundreds of thousands, as people from all 50 states and 182 countries tuned in to the Tribune, our YouTube channel and the embedded feeds we had offered for free to other news sites.
The events of that night sparked a conversation at the Tribune about taking the livestream out of its fixed location at the Capitol and going mobile. But being able to livestream anywhere at any time wasn’t cheap — leading to our first experiment with crowdsourcing. Almost three months to the day after the filibuster, the Tribune launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise the money to livestream the 2014 race for governor. The drive was successful — we met and exceeded our $60,000 goal well ahead of the deadline.
Speaking of deadlines, in the last year, the Tribune’s editorial team took a decisive turn: We added more watchdog reporting and high-impact enterprise projects to our beat reporting arsenal. We examined how TexasOne — a quasi-governmental agency funded by private donors, and used by the governor to promote the “Texas Miracle” — disburses funds to those same donors, themselves major campaign contributors to the governor. We uncovered illegal securities work and lapses in filings to the Texas Ethics Commission by a state senator who is now the Republican nominee for state attorney general. We learned that the governor, who shut down funding to the state’s public integrity unit when the district attorney who oversees it refused to step down after a DUI conviction, later offered to reinstate that money under the same conditions — which now has him in legal hot water.
Explosive population growth has put tremendous strain on both natural resources and infrastructure. In our “Troubled Waters: The State of Texas Rivers” series, Tribune reporters fanned out across the state to investigate the health — or lack thereof — of some of the state’s major river systems. Our “Faking the Grade” project uncovered the failures of a federally mandated, state-administered tutoring program that sent millions of dollars to private companies with little benefit to students.
Also in 2013, we took deep-dive policy reporting to the next level, launching two biweekly newsletters devoted to water and public education. We also enhanced the granddaddy of Tribune newsletters — the subscription-only politics site Texas Weekly — with an up-to-the-minute breaking news blog. More verticals are planned, ranging across the beats the Tribune covers.
From the beginning, the Tribune has distinguished itself with data and visualizations. Over the last year, we’ve rolled out some new tools that have driven considerable conversation and further reporting.
Our “31 Days, 31 Ways” project offered a tactile connection between the laws the Legislature passed and their effects on Texans’ lives. Our interactive on the impact of HB 2 (the bill Wendy Davis filibustered) on Texas abortion clinics starkly illustrated the degree of success lawmakers had reducing access to the procedure. By tracking the progress of eighth-graders though high school and beyond, we were able to compile a detailed — and unsettling — picture of most Texas students’ limited post-secondary success.
Our deep coverage of elections — including the recent state primaries and their subsequent runoffs — were enhanced by election night scoreboards and ongoing college basketball-style brackets that can be embedded on other websites and are avidly followed by political junkies of every persuasion.
But if our heads are in the virtual “cloud,” our reporters’ feet are firmly on the ground. From the halls of the Capitol to the formerly impoverished, now booming heart of the Eagle Ford Shale, from deep in the Rio Grande Valley to the Red River, from forested East Texas to arid El Paso, our reporters — and their datelines — show up all over the state. This year the Tribune opened its first office outside of Austin: our border bureau.
Undoubtedly our biggest undertaking in the last year was the launch of TribTalk, the Tribune’s brand new op-ed site. TribTalk is devoted to civic discourse and is home to columns and commentary from politicians, state leaders, academics and experts — along with anyone else who writes a thoughtful and reasoned piece. TribTalk is something of a laboratory for us, too — a place to explore ideas in design, functionality, revenue, even interaction. Our heavily moderated comments section offers, in place of a “like” button, a “respect” button, to try and foster that hard-to-find spirit of agreeing to disagree.
The Tribune continues to be the state’s go-to for Texas politics and policy news, data, video and events. In 2014 and beyond, we will keep searching for new ways to engage and inform our readers — and to do it in a self-sustaining way.
