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Newspaper Death Watch
Newspaper Death Watch |
| Last-Minute Deal Saves Star-Ledger From Shutdown Posted: 28 Sep 2013 07:45 AM PDT To no one’s great surprise, management and leaders of four unions at the Newark Star-Ledger reached an 11th-hour agreement on a new four-year contract that will save the 171-year-old daily from shutdown. After two weeks of intense negotiations, which culminated in a 48-hour around-the-clock bargaining session, negotiators said they reached a deal that involved sacrifices on each side. No details were released, but Ed Shown, president of the Council of Star-Ledger Unions, said management got most of the $9 million in cuts it was seeking. Union members will vote to ratify the contract next week. Star-Ledger executives had little to say, but in reading between the lines of what union negotiators said, we can assume that the unions got the worst of this deal. Management’s original proposal had demanded a 55% cut in wages and benefits, which union leaders said was outrageous. Management sought $9 million in annual savings on labor expenses, saying that was equivalent to the amount it could save by outsourcing production entirely. The Star-Ledger lost $19 million last year and is on track to lose that much money again this year. It’s hard to understand why cutting those losses in half is considered an accomplishment, particularly since owner Advance Publications has been hacking away at expenses across its portfolio of titles. We expect the drama isn’t over yet in Newark. With an unemployment rate of 10.2% and household income that’s one-third lower than the national average, the economy in New Jersey’s largest city doesn’t offer the paper’s management a lot of options.
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Nieman Journalism Lab
Nieman Journalism Lab |
- What does the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel know that your newsroom doesn’t?
- This Week in Review: Redeeming comment sections, and Bezos hints at his Post plans
- What makes the Texas Tribune’s event business so successful?
| What does the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel know that your newsroom doesn’t? Posted: 27 Sep 2013 07:45 AM PDT Editor’s note: In 1882, not long before his 25th birthday, a Wisconsin newspaperman named Lucius Nieman gave his new paper, The Milwaukee Journal, a mission: “The Journal will be the outspoken, independent organ of the people against all that is wrong or unworthy of support in public men and the legislation of the State and nation.” Over the following half-century, he built the Journal into a nationally noted, Pulitzer-winning powerhouse. He died in 1935; the next year, so did his wife. The couple had no children. In her will, Agnes Wahl Nieman left a large part of her estate — which had been built by the Journal’s success — to Harvard to “promote and elevate the standards of journalism and educate persons deemed especially qualified for journalism.” That gift led to the Nieman Fellowships and the Nieman Foundation, of which Nieman Lab is a part. This weekend, the foundation is celebrating its 75th anniversary. We thought it would be a good time to look in on Lucius Nieman’s old daily — now known, after a consolidation of morning and afternoon papers, as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. MILWAUKEE — You won’t find any newspapers for sale at the fluorescent-lit convenience store about two blocks from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s downtown headquarters. Ask for a copy of the local daily and you get an apologetic chuckle from the clerk. He instead suggests The Onion, print copies of which are just outside in a rusting metal box. In other cities, this might feel like a tidy metaphor for the plight of the newspaper industry — particularly the metro dailies. Before the web, metros occupied the business’ sweet spot: big newsrooms, a captive audience, and riches flowing in from the classifieds. But in the past decade, they’ve suffered the steepest declines, the biggest cutbacks, the worst losses. But something’s different in Milwaukee. The daily newspaper is actually…kind of…almost…thriving. There’s been plenty of pain along the way: layoffs, buyouts, wage freezes, and advertising declines. The staff is smaller, as it is almost everywhere. But spend time talking to people in the newsroom and you’ll find morale is unusually high. Out in the community, the newspaper has maintained one of the nation’s highest rates of market penetration. And there’s a common thread between those two facts: Through all the financial stress, the paper has maintained — even extended — its commitment to watchdog, investigative reporting. Journalistically, the Journal Sentinel is in a period of real strength. Since 2008 — over what has been the most crushing stretch in American newspaper history — the paper has won three Pulitzers and been finalists three other times. That’s a tally newspapers a lot larger than the Journal Sentinel can only envy. “At the risk of sounding like a Pollyanna, it really feels like we are actually moving toward something new and exciting,” said Dave Umhoefer, an investigative local government reporter who won one of those Pulitzers in 2008. “Several years ago, we lost 100 people or something in one buyout,” said Umhoefer, in his 29th year at the paper. “It’s just brutal. You wonder how you’re going to recover from that. So I don’t want to minimize how many people we lost. But it just feels like, over the last year or so, things have stabilized. We have a really solid core of people who can do this level of investigative reporting. If we could stay at this level of staffing and keep adding to the core of younger people, that’s a great recipe.”
The Journal Sentinel’s story begins with its location. Milwaukee is not an average newspaper town. It’s easy to fall back on Midwestern stereotypes — nice, earnest, civic-minded — but there’s some truth in them. Managing editor George Stanley said that reader surveys have shown that people read the paper because they have “a desire to be good citizens.” The newspaper’s pollster told Stanley that civic engagement isn’t always a priority for newspaper readers. “In some of the places they had been, that reason was not even on the list,” Stanley said. “Not only was it not the top reason for reading the paper, but it didn’t even come up!” The Journal Sentinel also found that the No. 1 reason women in its market read the paper is for investigative journalism, according to a survey Stanley says the paper conducted last year. “For men, investigative journalism was the No. 3 thing,” Stanley said. “No. 1 was the Packers. I forget what No. 2 was.” Whatever the reason, the paper is ubiquitous in Milwaukee. Walk around downtown on a weekday and you’ll lose count of people toting a print copy. Tim Martinez, 58, a lifelong Milwaukee resident and hairdresser, was reading the food section at a downtown Starbucks on a recent weekday. “I’m a pretty big news freak,” Martinez said. “I subscribe and read it every day — pretty much just print.” Around the corner, at a Downtown Books, both men behind the counter said they go to the Journal Sentinel’s website at least once a day. “I think the paper’s reputation is generally positive,” said Joe Guszkowski, 23. “I mean, it is the only newspaper, but their investigative coverage — I know they’re really well-regarded. And their sports section is great.” “It’s still a strong paper,” said longtime media watcher Jim Romenesko, who worked at the old Milwaukee Journal in the 1970s. “You have reporters who really know the city, know where the bodies are buried, and I think that works to their advantage. What they’ve done is focus on watchdog reporting. They’ve done a very good job at that.” The watchdog heritage started by Lucius Nieman was still alive and well when a young Romenesko was covering the cops beat at the Journal. The paper was flush with cash — for a time, it had a full-time ballet reporter — and it drew attention. “I recall Time magazine said that Milwaukee City Hall grinds to a halt when the Journal is delivered — that’s when it was an afternoon paper and they used to deliver the paper at 1 in the afternoon,” Romenesko told me. “Everything stopped. The Journal truly was the major media.” And Milwaukeeans paid close attention — not just to stories but to bylines. “I remember taking my VCR to a repair shop and the guy not wanting to charge me because he said, ‘I know you’re a police reporter,’” Romenesko remembered. “Later, when I went to the St. Paul Pioneer Press, not only was my byline there but my picture, and nobody recognized me. Not a single person. That always struck me when I was in St. Paul. The readers up there are not like they were in Milwaukee.”  The Newsboy, 1888. Carved, assembled and painted wood with folded tin; artist unknown. Milwaukee Art Museum, The Michael and Julie Hall Collection of American Folk Art. Photo credit: John Nienhuis. When times got tough in the 2000s, every metro newspaper had to cut staff. Many gutted their investigative capacity along the way. But the Journal Sentinel had a different strategy, building its values into the structure of the newsroom by hiring Mark Katches to create a special watchdog unit in 2006. Katches guided his team to two Pulitzers before leaving for the Center for Investigative Reporting, where he’s the editorial director. “It’s great,” said Umhoefer, who is on the team. “They gave us time. They gave us resources. They were patient — you know, accepting that you’re not always going to get to the bottom of something. Stories fall apart. So, they were supportive. Then we really started to upgrade our methods — a lot of data analysis, really intense vetting, hiring experts to check our work. We really upgraded our whole approach.” While investigative reporters are given time for heavy lifts, the watchdog team was also created with the Internet in mind. The section of the Journal Sentinel’s website dedicated to the Watchdog team’s work also includes quick-hit blog posts, resources for citizens interested in doing their own digging, and a data journalism vertical. The paper’s 2011 investigation into police officers who have broken the law, for example, is paired with an interactive database that allows readers to search by name for an officer’s criminal record. One of the keys to making the unit successful, according to Umhoefer and others, was keeping the team integrated with the rest of the newsroom. Each watchdog reporter is teamed up with a daily beat reporter. “Some investigative teams [at other papers] will be on a separate floor in the building,” Umhoefer said. “But we’re in the newsroom. We all still work weekend shifts and have to do that stuff. There’s enough of the feeling of being involved. That was the whole idea: Don’t let these people be divorced from reality where all their sources dry up and it becomes an ivory tower situation. Let stories bubble up from the beats. Follow up on stories instead of plucking ideas out of thin air.” Stanley says giving reporters freedom — and a feeling of being engaged with quality work — is one of the most important steps to keeping staffers happy. “People like to have a lot of say in how they do their job, and they like to have a degree of independence in what they do,” Stanley told me. “People also want to be master craftsmen, they want to be master journalists, they want to be master mechanics. But the most important thing is a sense of purpose larger than ourselves. You want to work for something that matters. “If you provide those three things, you have a happy and engaged workforce and the sky’s the limit on what you can accomplish.”  Journal Sentinel staffers await Pulitzer news in 2010. From left: George Stanley, John Diedrich, Raquel Rutledge, sports editor Garry Howard, and editor Marty Kaiser. Photo credit: Mark Hoffman “It has so much to do with the leadership at this paper,” said reporter Raquel Rutledge, who won a 2010 Pulitzer in local reporting for her investigative series on the state’s $350 million childcare system. “It means everything. It really does.” Her husband John Diedrich covers federal agencies for the Journal Sentinel and still finds time to coach Little League. His bosses also allowed him work full-time for the paper from Cambridge when Rutledge took a Nieman Fellowship in 2011. “We really like it here,” Diedrich told me. “The people who work here are all cranking at a really high level. Our bosses care about quality of life. So we’re fortunate enough that we get to work here but also we really like to work here.” Rutledge credited the collaborative atmosphere that allows people with complementary skills to work together. On one story, she had a stack of 1,800 PDFs and wanted to tally one field of data from each record to determine the public burden imposed by a tax subsidy. Counting manually was a waste of time, but no one in government said they had the total. “I just wanted this one number, this one field, but I wanted it for all 1,800,” Rutledge said. “Well, this 23-year-old dude comes out, writes a little code, and boom-boom-boom-bam: In a couple of hours we have a number that no one had ever seen before. It was a $29 million program. A $29 million burden on the rest of the state. I requested it a million different ways from county people and no one had ever counted it. That is such a huge public service. Hiring that kid was just one of the best things you could do.”  Lucius Nieman (right) visits his printing press. Photo courtesy the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The same trends that affect other newspapers affect the Journal Sentinel too. Print advertising continues to decline. The roughly 140 people on the editorial staff have plenty of room in a newsroom built for better days. At the paper’s parent company, Journal Communications, publishing’s share of the business has dropped; radio and television now make up nearly 60 percent of the company’s revenues. (Journal Communications’ stock price — which bottomed out at just 49 cents amidst the financial collapse in 2009 — has actually spent most of the past few years on a relatively steady climb. It’s now north of $8 a share.) But despite the ongoing financial pressures, the focus on watchdog work remains in place. Earlier this month, the paper revealed that it would challenge the local government for access to records in a closed judicial investigation. The probe involves a secret email server that was set up in a county executive’s office so high-level staffers could communicate outside of the regular government email system. This year it published a deep-dive into public assistance fraud, and a remarkable enterprise series about a botched sting by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Readers notice. At a burger joint half a mile from the Journal Sentinel, Juston Calvert, 25, says he inherited the print habit from his dad. Now, he and his four roommates subscribe. “It just doesn’t feel right to read online,” Calvert said. “They do a good job. I gotta say, I think it’s unbiased. It’s just information.” “People get the Pulitzer mixed up with the Nobel Prize,” reporter Diedrich said. “They’ll go, ‘You guys won the Nobel Prize! That’s great!’ It’s huge in our business, but the big picture is we’ve got to be indispensable to people. And you can’t forget the daily coverage. You have to do the moment-by-moment coverage while continuing to say, ‘Okay, people really want their dollars watched, they want their rights watched, they want the accountability reporting.’” At the newspaper — a short walk from riverfront breweries, an old-fashioned cheese market, and a bronze-and-pewter statue of the Fonz — news meetings are still held in the Nieman conference room, where Lucius’ portrait is on the wall. Journal Sentinel staffers like to joke that the room is so cold because his ghost still hangs out there. But managing editor Stanley thinks conditions are warming. The paper is doing well enough today that he says he’s “very hopeful” it will soon be able to grow its staff again. And although it has found some success during a difficult time for the industry, it hasn’t solved the question of what kind of business model will sustain its journalism in a post-print-advertising world. No one has. Yet Stanley suggests things would have to get really, really bad for the paper to start chipping away at its investigative unit or moving watchdog reporters to other areas of the newsroom. “There was a little paper in Maine last year with a two-person staff, and they were finalists for a Pulitzer Prize for an investigative series they did. My view has always been that really every reporter should be an investigative reporter. If we’re doing our jobs and we’re always chasing the best stories, we’re always going to be doing the investigative stuff.”
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| This Week in Review: Redeeming comment sections, and Bezos hints at his Post plans Posted: 27 Sep 2013 07:00 AM PDT Can user comments be saved?: Several media companies announced some radically diverging approaches to handling user comments, prompting renewed debate in the ongoing discussion over what to do with reader comments. Google’s YouTube, long known for some of the worst comments on the web, announced that it would tie comments to Google+. As Frederic Lardinois of TechCrunch noted, in addition to tying more comments to real names, the new system will allow ranking and nesting comments, as well as private commenting with those in users’ Google+ circles. Casey Newton of The Verge added some context to the move, writing that video creators have been pushing for YouTube to fix its comments for years, but the problem was too difficult to tackle without the infrastructure of Google+ in place. ReadWrite’s Selena Larson pointed out that there’s another motive at work here, too: It’s also “a thinly veiled attempt by Google to bring Google+ services to the mainstream.” Gawker, meanwhile, unveiled updates to its Kinja commenting platform that expand users’ control over comments even more broadly — letting them rearrange, filter, and prioritize comments. Gawker head Nick Denton explained why he believes comments can and should be redeemed, an idea enthusiastically endorsed by GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram. The commenting move that attracted the most attention, though was Popular Science’s decision to shut down its comments based in part on research that has shown that uncivil comments can polarize readers’ views of the articles to which they are attached. Because of this, the magazine’s Suzanne LaBarre said, “the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories.” Several writers pushed back against Popular Science’s case, including Slate’s Will Oremus, who argued that the magazine’s editors “seem to think of themselves as heralds trumpeting unimpeachable pronouncements from the castle tower to a crowd of subjects somewhere below,” and Ingram, who advocated fixing comments rather than destroying them. The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson and journalism professor Kathy Gill took the middle ground, with Gill concluding, “I don't trust ‘technological’ solutions when the problems rest with human behavior.” CNET’s Karyne Levy wrote about what it’s like to be the victim of comment-section trolls on a regular basis. Elsewhere, The New York Times Magazine’s Michael Erard took a big-picture view of the evolution of online comments and offered four suggestions for improving the culture of comments, including allowing user-driven moderating and rewarding connoisseurship. Hazlitt’s Navneet Alang echoed Erard in defending comment sections, and at The Awl, Ruth Graham examined the people who still write in the original comment sections, letters to the editor.
Bezos’ hints for the Post: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos went on the interview circuit this week, talking to NBC, ABC, CNN, and The Verge about his plans for Amazon as well as his newly purchased Washington Post. Regarding the Post, a handful of comments grabbed most of the attention as they gave a bit of a clue about what his ownership of the paper will look like. He told NBC that “printed newspapers on actual paper may be a luxury item,” comparing them to using horses for leisure rather than commuting, as they’ve been used in the past. PaidContent’s Mathew Ingram generally agreed with the analogy, though he said the changes in contemporary media are actually more like going back to the pre-mass media past. He told The Verge he won’t buy any other papers, and told CNN he plans to “help from a distance.” He also made some comments to ABC about applying Amazon’s customer-centered mantra to the Post and about throwing parties for yourself — comments that Ad Age’s Simon Dumenco said would have Post staffers reading the tea leaves about Bezos’ challenge to old-school publishing. Reading roundup: It was a pretty slow week on the news-about-news front, but there were a number of ongoing stories worth paying attention to: — Exhibit A filed under “slow week”: The beloved apparent Twitter spam bot @Horse_ebooks was revealed this week (by The New Yorker’s Susan Orlean!) to be an elaborate bit of performance art run by two viral marketers at BuzzFeed and Howcast, culminating in an exhibition at a New York art gallery. The two bought the account and apparently manually ran it to look like a (rather randomly poetic) bot. We’re still trying to figure out if this has any broader meaning whatsoever: Lots of people on Twitter were upset, Knight-Mozilla OpenNews’s Dan Sinker (no stranger to Twitter art projects) wrote a thoughtful post about art emerging out of randomness, and Slate’s Will Oremus said even though it was “fake,” it was still brilliant. — Details about Twitter’s coming IPO are trickling out: The Street reported that Twitter expects to sell about $1.5 billion of stock for a total valuation of about $15 billion to $16 billion, and All Things D’s Kara Swisher had more details about Twitter’s IPO strategy. Twitter also announced yet another TV-related partnership, this time with CBS and involving Twitter’s video program, Amplify. GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram wondered whether Twitter’s tying its fortunes to TV is the best course, and The Wall Street Journal’s Farhad Manjoo lamented that the IPO will make Twitter more generic and less addictive. — We’re continuing to see commentary on the proposed U.S. federal media shield law. The Knight Foundation’s Eric Newton called attention to the journalists opposing of the bill, while Slate’s Emily Bazelon said that despite its flaws, the bill is better than no shield law at all. Northeastern’s Dan Kennedy, meanwhile, dug up some commentary he wrote questioning the value of a shield law almost three decades ago. — The image-based social network Pinterest made a move to appeal to publishers with its introduction of new article pins, which will allow more detailed information about articles pinned to the site, including headline, author, and story description. As ReadWrite’s Lauren Orsini noted, the change was partly a response to the way its users were utilizing the site as a bookmarking service for articles. — Finally, two interesting reads on the practical side of online journalism: Media consultant Alan Mutter’s analysis of digital news subscription plans, concluding that “digital audiences aren't nearly as enthusiastic about paying for news as publishers are about charging for it,” and a wonderful reading list for numerous aspects of the craft of online journalism by professor Paul Bradshaw. Imaginary Post logo by outtacontext used under a Creative Commons license. |
| What makes the Texas Tribune’s event business so successful? Posted: 27 Sep 2013 06:30 AM PDT
When The Texas Tribune launched in 2009, Evan Smith says the nonprofit news site was in a “proof by assertion” stage. The assertion, in this case, was that there was an audience hungry for intensely focused-coverage of Texas politics and the industries, agencies, and personalities who inhabit that world. Four years later, it’s safe to say they were right, as the Tribune has become a success story in the world of online journalism and nonprofit news — a model both for its journalism and its business sense. One measure of that business success? This year the Trib is on track to generate a cool $1.2 million on events and conferences. (That’s up from around $800,000 last year.) Smith mentioned that figure publicly earlier this month, so I thought I’d ask him about that milestone. “It could be more,” Smith told me. “I honestly don’t know.” The more, in this case, will depend on how the remaining events the Tribune will hold in 2013 turn out — including its biggest event, The Texas Tribune Festival, which begins today. Echoing the The New Yorker Festival, the Tribune Festival is a three-day extravaganza of education, health care, transportation, energy, and other topics that click with the Tribune’s audience. The lineup of speakers for this year’s festival includes some hot names of the moment, like noted endurance orators Ted Cruz and Wendy Davis. Smith said he expects between 2,000 and 2,500 attendees at this year’s festival, and at a ticket price of $225 a piece, that translates into substantial revenue. Add in sponsorship packages and it’s not difficult to see how the numbers add up to a record year. But for all its size and stature, The Texas Tribune Festival only accounts for about 40 percent of the company’s events revenue, Smith said. The rest comes from sponsorships of talks, panels, and other events the Tribune convenes throughout the year. It’s why Smith is so bullish on events and the potential they hold as sources of both content and revenue. “Make no mistake: It is the rocket booster of this operation,” he said. Pack up and go on the roadThe Tribune does between 60 and 70 events annually, which range from conversations in the TribLive series to panels, receptions, and symposiums. While the Tribune holds a number of those events in Austin, many are held on location around Texas. This year, the Tribune has hit San Antonio, Dallas, and Houston, with future stops in places like Waco, Lubbock, and Fort Worth. For its Hot Seat events, the Tribune partners with a college — places like University of Houston, Southern Methodist, or Texas Christian. Next month at Texas Tech, the Tribune is bringing together three state legislators from the Lubbock area for a lunch time talk with people from their district. Smith said spreading out across the state means you can hold discussions on issues of regional importance, but also put state officials in front of audiences they may not meet regularly. That’s also the case for the Tribune, Smith said, as in-person events around the state can introduce the site to new people. “I think there’s unlimited opportunities around the state to bring this content to college campuses,” Smith told me. It’s also an advantage of the Trib’s model — focusing on state government — since each election brings a new set of capital—hinterland connections. Double up the audience: Turning live events into content that can live onlineThe talks, panels, and other events hosted by the Tribune are meant first for a live in-person audience. But because each event is filmed the talks can find wider audiences online, Smith said. “I think to be able to catch up on things on the site is a great benefit,” Smith said. But rather than just slapping a two-hour video on the web, Tribune staffers select clips and snippets of conversation to break out as individual videos around important topics or themes. By packaging videos to supplement the conversation, the Tribune is able to extend the life of the event in new ways. For instance, it would be easy for the Tribune to put together a video series on candidates for the upcoming governor’s race from clips from TribLive events. The videos can perpetuate a kind of loop. Each new video allows potential speakers and sponsors have another chance to see the work the Tribune does and how they could be involved, Smith said. It also keeps the events top of mind for the audience. “The best advertisements for the events are the events,” Smith said. Mark your calendar, leave some flexibilityThe Tribune keeps a busy schedule. In October, they’ve already got six events on the books, one just days after festival. April Hinkle, the Tribune’s chief revenue officer, told me they like to plan a slate of events early, which allows companies to figure out how an event sponsorship fits into their marketing budget. Some companies will sign on as a presenting sponsor for TribLive talks for the year, which for $30,000 gets them plenty of branding and mentions in promotions, at the event and on the accompanying videos.
At the Tribune Festival, companies have a broader buffet of sponsorship options, which range in price from $5,000 up to $175,000, Hinkle said. The price points offer different levels of visibility, and options like operating a booth, handing out literature, or hosting receptions, she said. Even with that set calendar of talks, panels and other activities, the Tribune leaves a lot of flexibility in its calendar for the kind of timely or topical subjects that come up over a year. That’s how you get events about transportation, water resources, or the future of Latino health care in Texas. Hinkle told me sponsorships for individual events start at $3,000, or $7,500 for a series of three. Now that the Tribune has been around for four years, companies have a sense of the site’s readership, what to expect out of the events, and how they can reach specific audiences, Hinkle said. “Really what we try to do is understand what sponsors are trying to achieve, and then use as many Tribune assets as we can to build an integrated program,” Hinkle said. Everyone likes free, right?With the exception of The Texas Tribune Festival, all of the Tribune’s events are free and open to the public. Smith said the idea of treating events as a kind of journalism content was part of the plan for the Tribune from the beginning. “The three keys of the Tribune are access, accountability, and transparency,” Smith said. And events bring all those things together for people in an open setting, Smith said. Smith said they didn’t want to hold members-only talks, or private salons similar to The Washington Post’s ill-fated plans from a few years back. “We’re going to make certain the public is in the room. It’s absolutely on the record and not just open to to people who are donors — but everybody,” he said. Making the events free helps draw an audience, but it also places an extra burden on finding sponsorship dollars. So far, that hasn’t been a problem, Smith said. Most Tribune events rely on a variety of companies, interest groups, and other organizations to foot the bill. “I think what is happening is we are getting traction in this idea that events are content in the same way traditional journalism is content,” Smith said. Know your audience, chase your audience, embrace your audienceFrom the coverage of the legislature and the governor’s office, to the database work on public employee salaries, the stories and projects created by the Tribune are directed towards people who operate in and around the world of politics. But that doesn’t exclude a wider audience. Smith appreciates how Trib events can put public officials back in front of their constituents, Smith says. “There are people in districts who do not have to go back home and answer hard questions. They don’t have to go home and ask to be elected; it almost happens by default,” Smith said. “And yet we have got elected officials to go back to their districts and take questions from 200, 300 people.” While the events can help broaden the Tribune’s reach beyond the halls of the statehouse, the intended target remains legislators, state officials, lobbying groups, lawyers, and other industries who have a stake in what happens in Austin. The Texas Tribune Festival is perhaps the best example, the event Smith says: “We refer to it routinely as Woodstock for wonks.” The festival has now expanded to 11 tracks, each of which drill down into issues like education, criminal justice, and the environment. Aside from providing a forum for all these discussions and panels, Smith said one of the biggest benefits of the festival is that convenes the people shaping the future of Texas. It may be a niche audience, but it’s one the Tribune has had success with so far, Smith said. “It’s a little like Meet the Press or Face The Nation,” Smith said. “You’re not getting the largest audience, but the right audience.” Photo of the 2012 Texas Tribune Festival closing ceremony by Callie Richmond/Texas Tribune used under a Creative Commons license. Photo of 2013 festival programs by Emily Ramshaw. |
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