The Texas Tribune has been an industry leader in the digital newspace for over a decade. Our work has been most recently cited by the Local News Initiative, who named us a Bright Spot, and PEN America, who lauded our elections work in a piece about community-centered journalism. Most recently the Tribune has been cited as a standard by Semafor and other organizations.
Our voting help desk is a texting line that has helped hundreds of people vote in the recent primaries alone. What started as an emergency communication system during a deadly winter storm in 2021 turned out to be an effective way to directly answer reader questions about candidates, proposed legislation, ballots and more. Interactions via our texting line have improved our voter guides for primary, local and runoff elections that empower voters and drive engagement via newsletter signups.
Recently, the Tribune broke down how a small group of voters make large decisions in Texas, using fish!
When our women’s health reporter filed a story from rural East Texas about struggling moms, subjects of the story could not load the story on their own phones because of low bandwidth in the area. To address the issue, our engineering team developed a text-only version of our website. This will help people in areas with a lack of broadband access get essential information even if their service cannot load visual-heavy stories. This has been helpful as we cover wildfires and floods in remote regions of the state.
These innovative and interactive tools have helped the Tribune get vital information into the hands of Texans during key legislative sessions and elections over the last year.
The Tribune’s audience team also frequently experiments with social tools in various mediums. In 2024, The Tribune is listening closely to Texans about their lives and communities and how they engage in public life as part of our We the Texans series. We are holding community listening events across the state.
Our women’s health reporter shared the story of Miranda Michel, who was carrying twins that wouldn’t survive after birth and was unable to have an abortion. It is a significant point of pride that Michel felt the story accurately reflected her lived experience, and felt empowered by sharing. Readers reached out, unsolicited, to donate thousands of dollars to Michel’s GoFundMe for hospital expenses. This reporting was republished on the front pages of three outlets following publication.
In addition to the texting line, callout forms and social media strategies run by the Tribune’s audience team, we’ve experimented with new distribution strategies in recent months. Following a story about the impact of the industrial sites on largely Latino communities along the Houston Ship Channel, reporters returned to the community to distribute the story in person. Reporters and partner organizations distributed resources including translations and flyers to the mostly Spanish-speaking community, who mostly receive their news through Whatsapp and word of mouth and therefore are not regular readers of the Tribune. The lead reporter unpacks this strategy online.
