The Texas Tribune, the pioneering digital news organization, laid off 11 percent of its staff Wednesday, renewing worries about the sustainability of local nonprofit journalism.
While layoffs in the moribund local news sector are routine at this point, the Tribune’s business model has largely insulated it from cutbacks that have whittled local and regional journalism in recent decades. These are the first layoffs in its 14-year history.
Founded in 2009, the Austin-based company’s solid financial grounding and focus on civic engagement made it a shining example for the Baltimore Banner, the City and hundreds of other nonprofit newsrooms that have sprung up in recent years as traditional local newspapers circle the drain. The Tribune, which is free to read, covers public policy, immigration, health care and the environment; its reporters have won national awards for coverage of the school shooting in Uvalde, the 2021 winter storm and other major Texas news events.
The Tribune “has played this outsized, positive role in practically inventing a whole new type of local news,” said Steven Waldman, the founder and president of Rebuild Local News, a nonprofit that advocates public policy to support local news. “It pioneered and created the local nonprofit model.”
The Tribune is mostly funded by contributions from around 10,000 members, major donations, corporate sponsorships, and an events business whose linchpin is the Texas Tribune Festival, which drew an estimated 9,000 attendees last year and is scheduled to take place again next month. As of 2022, the nonprofit’s board of directors included the chief operating officer of Vox Media, the founder of the Latina Leadership Institute and a chair of international journalism at the University of Texas at Austin.
Wednesday’s layoffs signal that the Tribune isn’t immune to the challenges facing commercial media companies. The Tribune laid off 11 staffers, including the entire copy desk, the multimedia team and reporters Jolie McCullough, who covered criminal justice; Alexa Ura, who covered Texas’s changing demographics; and longtime editor David Pasztor, who wrote on X — the social media platform formerly known as Twitter — that the cuts are the Tribune’s attempt to “reverse financial and leadership tailspin.” The Tribune’s two podcasts were put on hiatus, Shah said in a memo published Thursday.
In an hours-long staff meeting Thursday morning, Tribune leadership — including Shah and Editor in Chief Sewell Chan — sought to reassure staffers that the painful cuts were necessary for growth.
“We’re confident that the revenue model we’ve built is actually a very good revenue model,” Shah said. “The challenge is that our revenue hasn’t kept pace with our expenses.”
The Tribune budgeted 10-percent revenue growth for 2023 over 2022 and is behind where they should be to meet that goal, according to a company spokesperson.
By now, the decline of local news is well-understood. The advertising revenue that kept print newspapers afloat for most of the 20th century shrank with the rise of digital advertising on free sites like Google and Facebook. News businesses have struggled to find sustainable market solutions: While subscription revenue supports a handful of national publications, only wealthier Americans are likely to pay for news, according to a 2022 survey by Gallup and the Knight Foundation — meaning huge sections of the public are left without crucial information about their communities. This reality, combined with a dearth of public policy initiatives to support local news, has doomed thousands of once thriving local newspapers and created news deserts all over the country.
It has also opened the door for journalism experimentation, including nonprofit models.
The Tribune has been on the cutting edge of a golden age in local nonprofit journalism — and even after Wednesday’s layoffs, remains one of the largest local newsrooms in the country. Its website draws an average of more than 5 million people per month. It provides all of its content free to dozens of print, radio, and television news outlets around the state in an effort to democratize access to civic information.
“I don’t want to over-generalize based on” these cuts, said Victor Pickard, a professor of media policy at University of Pennsylvania and the author of several books about democracy and local media. “But I do think this reflects broader structural problems that are facing local journalism in particular.”
Pickard sees promise in nonprofit journalism, but he also sees limitations — namely that it is still dependent on philanthropy, support from readers who can afford to pay for it and other forms of private capital.
“Even among our best nonprofit news institutions out there, they’re not immune to these structural problems that are inherent to the economics of local journalism,” Pickard said.
