Informing communities to strengthen democracy is so simple, but so complicated.
I spent the weekend in the Lone Star State for the Texas Tribune Festival. It’s hard not to have a blast in Austin, even when temperatures are soaring. (It helps when you get sustenance from Torchy’s Tacos and Terry Black’s barbecue!) I was interviewed by Emily Ramshaw, the CEO and co-founder of The 19th — an independent, non-profit news organization that features a diverse staff of reporters — and the next day I took on the role of moderator for a conversation with former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords and Senator Mark Kelly about Gabby’s continued recovery and their indefatigable efforts to reduce gun violence.
I attended a session with Mitch Landrieu, the former mayor of New Orleans, who is coordinating the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act for the Biden administration and saw Kara Swisher in conversation with former Representative Adam Kinzinger about his upcoming book, Renegade. Karl Rove and David Axelrod jostled over all things political, and Duke law professor, Nita Farahany, and Representative Ro Khanna from California had a fascinating, disturbing conversation about A.I. I also watched Evan Smith, the co-founder and former CEO of the Texas Tribune, do a masterful job of interviewing Senator Joe Manchin about a possible third party run. (Despite Evan’s best efforts to get Manchin to make an announcement, he demurred.)
Evan also gave a compelling speech on the importance of journalism, particularly local journalism in our often chaotic, fragmented media landscape. I was inspired by what he said, and I thought you might be too, so see below!
Informing communities to strengthen democracy. That’s what tonight’s about, right? That’s what this whole weekend is about. In some ways so simple. Oh, but so complicated. And so hard.
Stop me if you’ve heard this before. When John, Ross and I started the Tribune, we did it in response to the decline in the number of sources of reliable news in Texas — we’d watched with alarm over the previous twenty years as papers like the Dallas Times Herald, the Houston Post and the San Antonio Light went away, as broadcast stations pulled back from covering the Legislature and state agencies, as the number of reporters at the Capitol dropped to a third of what it had been. Things were bad. We thought they’d get worse. We didn’t know how right we were.
We wanted to be a solution to that problem. We raised about $4M in that partial first year, 2009, from individuals, foundations and corporations to get the Trib launched and started with 17 on staff on day one, 11 of those in the newsroom. We planned to raise $3M a year each of the next three years, or a total of $9M. Instead we raised $15M, and we were off to the races. By the time I stepped down as CEO at the end of last year, we had raised nearly $120M, and we had more journalists covering state government than any news org, for profit or nonprofit, in the country.
But something else important happened during those 13 years. We catalyzed a movement. All over the country, in communities without adequate sources of news, good actors — journalists and funders and civic leaders of every political stripe — came together to launch their versions of what we successfully pulled off here — often after spending days in Austin with our team. We showed them the ropes, and then they went back home and created the thing that works for them. Every community is different, so every one of these is different. If you’ve seen one nonprofit news organization, you’ve seen one nonprofit news organization. But we all share strands of DNA. We’re never more humbled than when a news startup describes itself as “The Texas Tribune of ___.”
I have the honor of working with many of those innovators and pathbreakers today in my new role as a senior adviser at Emerson Collective, one of the most generous funders of nonprofit news. I’ve spent the last nine months traveling the country, from coast to coast and border to border, like an itinerant preacher — evangelizing and sermonizing about the local news crisis and how to solve it. You can’t spell evangelist without Evan, right? I’ve been eagerly gathering insights into the landscape out there — the good and the bad, the possibilities and the challenges, and in particular the enormous need — the need we’re meeting and the need that’s going unmet, along with the consequences of not meeting it.
A few stats. Since 2005 a quarter of the nation’s newspapers have shut down. By 2025 it will be a third of all papers. Since 2008, newsroom employment in this country is down by more than 25%. And there are 70 million people — a fifth of the nation’s population — who live someplace with no source of local news or one on the verge of going away. Most are in communities of color. All are in counties where the media household income is below the national average. The people who start behind the starting line of every race start behind this one.
We live in two Americas: one informed and one not. It’s in the not-informed America that misinformation and conspiracy theories have really taken root. This is how we got to a moment where truth isn’t truth, facts aren’t facts, and reality is a subjective construct. This is the poison coursing through our veins. I’ve never been more sure that robust, credible, independent local news is the antidote to the poison. We need more good information to push out the bad.
On that front, two hopeful signs. The first is the American Journalism Project — John Thornton’s second family. AJP, which John co-founded, is the first-ever venture philanthropy dedicated to nonprofit local news. It makes grants to nonprofit news organizations, partners with communities to launch new orgs, and coaches leaders as they grow and sustain their newsrooms. In just four years, AJP has raised $165 million and supported 41 orgs in 32 states, including 6 started from scratch. There are a number of leaders of those orgs scattered throughout the room, but I’m going to single out one. Where is Rita Danish? I want to recognize one of my heroes — a former Republican judge in Ohio who is now the CEO of Signal Ohio, a terrific new news organization that is an example of the impact AJP is having around the country. Rita, welcome to Austin.
The second hopeful sign is Press Forward. Where is John Palfrey? On September 7, the MacArthur Foundation, which John leads, and 21 other philanthropies announced a combined commitment of more than $500 million over five years to address the crisis in local news. MacArthur is itself in for $175 million and the Knight Foundation is in for $150 million, with the balance coming from the rest. The initiative promises to re-center local news as a way to bring communities together, support new models and solutions that are scaleable; and close longstanding inequities in journalism coverage and practice. John and I will be talking about this tomorrow at 11am at the Omni.
It’s great to have air cover — to have the support of national philanthropy in building and sustaining the newsrooms we need. But ground cover is essential as well. You need local support to match or exceed the national support if this is gonnawork. I’m happy to tell you the Tribune has built, yes, an army of faithful small-dollar contributors over the years, and they enormously appreciate the work we do. Just this week, during our fall pledge drive, a woman sent in $51 and included this message: “I value Texas Tribune’s non-partisan reporting, especially out in Far West Texas where we have no broadcast TV. Without public radio broadcasting and Texas Tribune texts and emails, we would have no idea what is happening in Austin or statewide.” I can’t tell you how many times I heard a version of that story over the last fourteen years.
But the Tribune has also been successful at accessing the considerable resources of wealthy individuals and deep-pocketed foundations in Texas — including many people and some institutions in this room. This is a moment when we need you to step up again.
Evan Smith is a co-founder and senior adviser at The Texas Tribune, where he served as CEO from 2009 to 2022. He’s also a senior adviser at Emerson Collective and the host of the weekly interview program “Overheard with Evan Smith”.
