The Texas Tribune

About the Project

When The Texas Tribune launched in November 2009, everything about it felt like a gamble.

Newspapers and TV stations were cutting their coverage of state politics and policy. We made it our central focus. Our industry colleagues were erecting paywalls. We gave our stories to readers and other news organizations for free. And with the news industry’s subscription and ad revenue in decline, we pursued an entirely untested business model.

Eight years later, those risks have reaped rewards. Today the Tribune is one of the world’s most widely respected media startups — and the national gold standard for statehouse reporting.

We’ve grown from seven employees to the largest newsroom covering a state capitol in the country. We reach 2 million people each month via our website — nearly eight times higher than in 2010 – and our readership has surged by 40 percent since 2017.

But that doesn’t capture our full reach. More than 100 print, digital, radio and TV news partners statewide run our stories on their front pages and their airwaves. And we broker national partnerships, providing Texas-based expertise to everyone from ProPublica and Reveal to textbook publishers.

Each year, we convene more than 60 free-to-the-public policy events in small towns and big cities across Texas, giving tens of thousands of people direct access to their elected officials. Our signature event, the Texas Tribune Festival, attracts more than 5,000 attendees.

But our hallmark is our public service journalism, our watchdog coverage of statewide issues and elected officials. In the past year alone, our journalists:

• Revealed how Texans were being jailed for missing furniture payments under a loophole in a state rent-to-own law. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle pledged reforms.
• Investigated sexual malpractice at the Texas Capitol, leading lawmakers to put sweeping new harassment policies into place.
• Explained, via interactive map, how Texas Republicans’ gerrymandering efforts have suppressed the voting power of millions of Hispanics.
• Built data tools to expose how Texas allows industrial facilities to spew unauthorized and deadly air pollution with few consequences.
• Partnered with ProPublica for a Trump-era cautionary tale on how the federal government abused its power to seize property for a border fence the last time this was en vogue.
• Went deep on Texas’ jaw-dropping maternal mortality rate, one researchers have been unable to explain “in the absence of war or natural disaster.”
• Produced a moving mini-documentary on Texas families’ desperate effort to get access to medicinal marijuana.
• Kept our foot on the gas watchdogging relief efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey.We’ve had the freedom to pursue this work because our experiment of a business model is sustainable. We’ve raised more than $53 million since day one, revenue that has grown us from a scrappy start-up into a renowned news operation, a hub for the Texas politics and policy community, and a model for nonprofit media around the globe.