about  /   archives  /   contact  /   subscribe  /   twitter    
Share this entry
Make this entry better

What are we missing? Is there a key link we skipped, or a part of the story we got wrong?

Let us know — we’re counting on you to help Encyclo get better.

Put Encyclo on your site
Embed this Encyclo entry in your blog or webpage by copying this code into your HTML:

Key links:
Primary website:
texastribune.org
Primary Twitter:
@texastribune

Editor’s Note: Encyclo has not been regularly updated since August 2014, so information posted here is likely to be out of date and may be no longer accurate. It’s best used as a snapshot of the media landscape at that point in time.

The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit online news organization based in Austin, Texas, that focuses on political and civic issues.

The site was founded in 2009 by venture capitalist John Thornton and former Texas Monthly editor Evan Smith. Thornton raised $4 million in startup funds for the site, including $1 million of his own money and $750,000 in grants from the Knight Foundation and Houston Endowment.

The Tribune is also supported by about 3,000 donating members, as well as corporate sponsors and dozens of both free and paid public events, on which it was on track to make $1.2 million in 2013. The site started with 16 staff members, including 11 journalists (it had grown to a staff of 50 and 18 full-time reporters by 2014), and a $1.6 million budget. The Tribune was profitable for the first time in 2012. By 2011, the site had raised $3.7 million and spent $4 million. It had raised about $11.8 million in total by early 2012, with a budget of $4.2 million.

In March 2011 the Tribune and The Bay Citizen were awarded a $975,000 grant from the Knight Foundation to develop an open source content management system specifically for news organizations. It received another $1.5 million grant from Knight in 2013 to refine its business model. All told, the Tribune had raised almost $11 million through January 2012. It projected $4.5 million in revenue for that year and was profitable. As of 2014, just more than half of its revenue came from corporate sponsorships and live events, with another 17% from individual donations, 17% from foundations, and 12% from memberships.

In 2014, the Tribune launched TribTalk, an opinion website that is also home to the organization’s native advertising program. The Tribune also owns Texas Weekly, a small weekly online political newsletter founded in 1984. The newsletter brings in revenue to cover about 15 percent of the Tribune’s expenses, and Thornton has mentioned plans to launch similar specialty publications.

The Tribune publishes its stories primarily on its website, though they are also available free to other Texas news outlets.

The Tribune has been involved heavily in social media and data journalism, initiatives for which it earned praise at its launch. In May 2010, Smith reported that the Tribune’s databases were responsible for more than a third of its 5.3 million page views after six months. For 2012 the site reported 5.7 million unique visitors and 40 million page views.

About the Tribune

Interview with former reporter Elise Hu:

Recent Nieman Lab coverage:
Aug. 28, 2024 / Sophie Culpepper
Three more nonprofit newsrooms announce content sharing agreements with the AP — In March, newspaper chains Gannett and McClatchy stopped using Associated Press wire reports and photos to cut costs. Just a few days after the chains’ decisions were reported, the nonprofit Texas Tribune announced a m...
July 18, 2024 / Sarah Scire
To find readers for longform investigations, Public Health Watch leans on partners and in-person work — In the natural world, convergent evolution is when two organisms independently evolve to look or behave in very similar ways. The beloved — if endangered and chlamydia-ridden — koala evolved human-like fingerprints d...
May 23, 2024 / Sarah Scire
Postcards and laundromat visits: The Texas Tribune audience team experiments with IRL distribution — When The Texas Tribune began reaching out to residents in the Cloverleaf neighborhood, near Houston, its reporters knew many community members were not regular readers. In fact, most in the primarily Spanish-speaking are...
May 7, 2024 / Joshua Benton
This year’s Pulitzer Prizes were a coming-out party for online media — and a marker of local newspapers’ decline — Some day in the distant future, scholars looking back on the evolution (devolution?) of the American news business will consider May 6, 2024 a date worthy of note. They’ll see it as the day the most prestigious pri...
Jan. 24, 2024 / Sarah Scire
The Texas Tribune moves to unionize — Staff across several departments at The Texas Tribune announced they’re unionizing Wednesday. The move comes in the wake of layoffs that took staff and news industry onlookers by surprise last year. Newsroom organi...

Recently around the web, from Mediagazer:

Primary author: Mark Coddington. Main text last updated: May 15, 2014.
Make this entry better
How could this entry improve? What's missing, unclear, or wrong?
Name (optional)
Email (optional)
Daily Telegraph logo

The Daily Telegraph is a daily broadsheet newspaper distributed throughout the United Kingdom and internationally. It was founded in 1855 as The Daily Telegraph and Courier by Col. Arthur B. Sleigh, mostly as a way to air a personal grievance Sleigh had against Prince George, Duke of Cambridge. From 1986 to January 2004, The Daily…

Put Encyclo on your site
Embed this Encyclo entry in your blog or webpage by copying this code into your HTML:

Encyclo is made possible by a grant from the Knight Foundation.
The Nieman Journalism Lab is a collaborative attempt to figure out how quality journalism can survive and thrive in the Internet age.
Some rights reserved. Copyright information »