The Texas Tribune has been a leader in online journalism over the past year, experimenting with new formats and methods to reach readers as online news consumption habits change. This January, as the state Legislature was set to take up school voucher legislation that had been debated for more than two years, we launched a “special report” that aimed to compile our years of reporting on the topic into a single handy guide that could be shared and allow people to catch up on the issue. It was extremely well-received, with educators, other journalists and advocates sharing it widely with their constituents and audiences to catch up on this important and complex issue. The report was one of our top five stories for traffic that month and generated the most newsletter sign-ups so far this year. It also featured an AI bot that allowed readers to ask specific questions about the issue or topic. The bot was fed only by our previous reporting. It answered many readers’ questions. For questions it couldn’t answer, it told the reader that and then forwarded that question to our education team. That team used those questions as story idea generators, leading to new stories on topics like how the vouchers would affect teacher retirement funding.
We’ve continued to emphasize data and interactive peices: An explorer allowing people to find data about the demographics, success metrics and staffing of their local schools. A database of state employee salaries. A regularly updated tracker of measles cases in West Texas. The status of major bills in our legislative session. AI-generated text to voice for our articles. And much more.
These smart stories and products have allowed traffic to grow in 2025, against industry trends. But we also recognize that news consumption habits are changing and we need to reach people off our platforms. We have 18 newsletters. We launched a podcast this year. We launched a presence on WhatsApp and launched a new vertical video strategy that has drawn praise across the industry and led our leader to be asked to speak about it a multiple journalism conferences. We also host regular live events, which are free to attend and livestreamed on our site for people across the stae to read.
