Non-Profit News for Texans

The Texas Tribune, a new non-profit nonpartisan online news site, launched yesterday and there is already big buzz among bloggers and tweeters from across the nation. The site's mission is to "promote civic engagement and discourse on public policy, politics, government, and other matters of statewide concern" through their original content that they plan to share freely with other news organizations, and eventually through events open to the public.

The site is unique not only because it is among the "new wave" of non-profit news experiments, but also because of their extensive searchable databases including a directory of Texas elected officials. In an interview with the Poynter Institute, Texas Tribune reporter Matt Stiles said that these 11 databases are just the beginning, and eventually the databases will interact with eachother so that readers can see how the information is related.

This is a relatively new concept in news, where reporters give readers all of the raw data used for stories and let them use it as they wish instead of simply interpreting the information. It only works in certain stories or with certain audiences, as some data is better explained through a narrative or graphic rather than overwhelming the audience with meaningless unexplained figures.

The stories on the Texas Tribune website are organized by topic: ranging from immigration, education, and health care to the major campaigns and candidates in the big 2010 Texas elections.

As a non-profit news organization, the Texas Tribune relys completely on donations. According to their about us section, they have already raised $3.6 million and do not plan on selling advertising on their site. In the opinion of Rosental Alves, the Director of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas and (more personally) the professor of my Multimedia Journalism course at UT, the refusal of advertising is a mistake. In their initial launch, they will be able to pay for business costs and the salaries of their reporters but "a few years down the road sustainability will become an issue without Google Ads" according to Alves.

I agree with him, and discussed with my father, a former newspaper journalist, the issue of sustainibility and donations. He raised another interesting point- how can they keep political lobbyists and big PACs from becoming their main donors and thus influincing their "nonpartisan" news? My inclination is that since they are a non-profit and all of their financial records are public, taking money from such organizations would tarnish their reputation and diminish their credibility, but it will be interesting to see who their major donors are in the coming years.

Over all, I am optemistic and excited about the launch of this new news organization. As a journalism student, I often find myself combating those who say "newspapers are dead" and this is one of the main examples that I give for the future of news. Now that's not to say that I think this is the only solution, and I think that this particular site definitely still needs some work; it's currently running extremely slow because of all of the heavy traffic, and the simple solution is to buy more bandwidth. But I think that for a first launch, the Texas Tribune did a great job, and I look forward to what they, and other similar news sites, will produce in the future.

(The following video was produced by the Texas Tribune and gives more information from the co-founders.)