The Texas Tribune’s wide variety of storytelling formats include innovative 3-D mapping, immersive audio, Facebook Instant Articles, and digital documentaries.
In the last year, The Texas Tribune’s all-star cast of journalists swung for the fences — and repeatedly knocked it out of the park.
Politics remained our bread and butter: Our biggest-in-the-nation statehouse bureau laid claim to four GOP presidential candidates with deep Texas ties — and one, Ted Cruz, who tried to go the distance. Our primary night election scoreboard and results widgets were embedded by digital news operations across the country. And our comprehensive politics and policy reporting plumped up the pages and airwaves of dozens of newspapers and TV stations statewide, in addition to reaching new audiences by way of our content partnership with The Washington Post.
But we also found time to get experimental with our storytelling, rolling out ambitious investigations and creative projects that took advantage of new platforms and partners, live events and emerging technology.
A sampling:
All the while, the Tribune maintained its commitment to data journalism: Our news apps team produced countless visualizations, upgraded our massive Public Schools Explorer and rolled out Faces of Death Row, a tool to track the nation’s most active execution chamber.
We doubled down on audience expansion efforts, holding 50 live (and livestreamed) events, hosting 3,200 attendees at our annual Texas Tribune Festival, and luring more than 100,000 subscribers to our suite of politics and policy newsletters.
We spent more time engaging with our readers online and in the comments, converting them and many subjects of our news stories into contributors to TribTalk, our popular op-ed site.
And we rolled out an aggressive social media strategy, prepping our content for Facebook Instant Articles, optimizing our video for social, and drawing in thousands of new viewers by streaming newsroom interviews and reporting in the field live on Facebook.