Texas Tribune buys Texas Weekly

Texas Tribune, the just-announced, well-funded nonprofit that plans to cover Texas politics and more starting in the fall, is wasting no time building up a team and incorporating institutional memory by acquiring Texas Weekly and naming its owner and editor,  Ross Ramsey,  managing editor of the Tribune. Among other things, the acquisition buys Texas Tribune a valuable content base — nearly two decades of electronic archives.

Texas Weekly is an online newsletter founded in 1984 focused on Texas government and politics. Most of its content is delivered to subscribers in a weekly emailed edition priced at $250. Current subscribers will “receive, for the duration of their subscriptions, a new weekly publication featuring premium content not available to regular readers of the Tribune.” (This suggests that Texas Tribune, also, could have in mind a premium content edition for paying subscribers, although founder John Thornton has been pretty negative about paywalls in the past.)

Along with the Texas Weekly purchase and the appointment of Ramsey, the announcement discloses the hiring of “the first five reporters on the Tribune’s newsroom team: Brandi Grissom, Elise Hu, Emily Ramshaw, Abby Rapoport, and Matt Stiles.” Bios are in the release here.

Martin Langeveld | July 23, 2009 | 1:04 p.m.

Tags: John Thornton, Ross Ramsey, Texas Tribune, Texas Weekly