Evan Smith, Ross Ramsey and John Thornton founded the Texas Tribune at the end of 2009. Smith spent nine years at Texas Monthly, first as editor and then as president and editor in chief. Under his watch, the magazine was nominated for 16 National Magazine Awards and twice won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence. Ramsey was the owner of Texas Weekly, a political newsletter. Thornton is a venture capitalist.
Using a non-profit model and limiting themselves geographically, they set out to fill the gap in public-interest journalism they saw in Texas.
We interviewed Smith, CEO and editor-in-chief, about the importance of a free press and how to invent new business models to pay for it.
FFW: Why do we need something like the Texas Tribune? Isn’t this what newspapers are supposed to do?
Newspapers realize that whatever else you say about serious journalism – how important it is to a functioning society and a democracy, and how it raises the level of engagement by teeing up issues in your community and all over the state, and how that can
result in the solving of problems that would not be solved but for them teeing up those issues – whatever else you say about it, it’s not a good business.
The for-profit media cannot monetize serious content, public-interest journalism. People don’t buy newspapers to read about healthcare, public education, higher education, immigration, transportation, which on the one hand makes sense—it’s kind of boring. It’s not Tiger Woods’ text messages. It’s not college football. It’s not crime in your neighborhood. Those are drivers of traffic or drivers of audience. But those serious things matter to everyone. Roads matter. Schools matter. Demographic change matters. Natural resources matter. They matter to every single person. But exactly at the moment that those things are problems and as pressing as they are, the coverage of them has declined.
So, we took the position in Texas where the need was really pressing, that we would do this for this great state.
People assume that Texas is a one-party, Republican state. We joke that it’s a two-party state and the two parties are moderate Republican and conservative Republican. But the reality is we all want Texas to be the best place it can be. So whether you travel on
We hope that this will be the means to getting there.
[Podcast on What happens to the local story. Where the need exists is locally because local papers are the most challenged financially.]
FFW: What luxuries does starting from scratch afford you?
First, you get in a best practice mode. You look at what other people are doing well and doing poorly and you look to mimic and model the things they’re doing well. You have no legacy impediments to success. You don’t have to break anything down.
One of the things I discovered in just six months is that when you’re reacting to things that don’t work and you run screaming in the other direction to create a business like this one, you often over-correct.
For example, many of us think that the legacy media has too many layers. It’s so difficult to get anything done, especially editorially. So we wanted to build a model where there were no layers, where the answer to every question was “yes” and not “no,” where you looked for reasons to say “yes” and not “no,” where we were more nimble.
When I left Texas Monthly, I was working at piloting an ocean liner and now I’m piloting a cigarette boat. In retrospect I think a few layers—not as many as previously but more than none—is probably more what we need.
FFW: When I look at you, I see a newspaper.
We don’t self-define as a newspaper. We’re a news organization. We provide content across platforms, across devices. We don’t just do traditional journalism, we also do events. Our use of data has been transformational in terms of our self-image and the image we project out to the world and that’s not something newspapers have been particularly good at.
FFW: What about social media?
People talk about the website, website, the website. Let me tell you something: the destination website is going to go the way of the dodo bird here pretty soon. No one comes to a website. They have content that they access wherever they access it. Disintermediation is the big word of the year, content that is disintermediated from its original source. In some ways we worry less about the website than the ways we push content out to people where they live.
Social media is very important to us. We got 10,000 fans on Facebook in six months, 5,000 followers on Twitter. We use social media very aggressively. We have email alerts that go directly into people’s inboxes every day. We have free syndication of our content to anyone who will pick it up. We call it “content partner promiscuity.” It runs in the newspapers around Texas, their websites, public radio; we had a collaboration with Newsweek that resulted in a cover story. NPR has asked us to upload our content directly into their API. We’re in conversations with the New York Times for Texas-specific content.
FFW: Do you believe that print is dying?
No. It may get smaller and smaller as you get to the horizon line but it will never go away. This is not a zero sum choice. It’s not A or B. It’s not that the print media in this state is not doing good work; they’re just not doing enough of it.
We’re going to have enough places to get our good journalism, even our silly journalism. They’re going to be more nichey. If you like left handed country singers with gold teeth, it’s going to be that. News is going to be like that.