Tribune logo Over beers at TRIO last Tuesday, we had a chat with former Texas Monthly president and editor-in-chief Evan Smith about his new nonprofit media project, the Texas Tribune . The Tribune makes its official debut tomorrow, and will be hosting a fancy launch party to celebrate. All founding members who donate at least $50 by 5 p.m. today will be invited to attend. You can find more details on their site. Who should read the Texas Tribune, and how are you going to let them know you exist? The theory here is that everybody has a reason to read the Tribune. This is not an insider publication; it's not a publication for only people who work within two blocks of the Capitol on either side, as a political newsletter might be. It's not a hyper-insider deal. of course, you want those people, because they're the ones who give you credibility. If they don't believe that what you're doing has value, then you're not going to get anybody—or it'll be a Pyrrhic victory. All of a sudden, you're USA Today, and you're publishing color weather maps. We don't want to be a publication for just the masses, but If you don't have the mass group in addition to the class group, then you're also sunk, because you can't be so inside that you don't give people a way in. "Everybody else in Texas has as much of a stake in the outcome of these big policy issues. They all have a reason to be engaged, but they're not being given a reason to be engaged." So we've identified the universally potential readers of the Tribune, or users of the Tribune since it's not really a print publication, in a couple of categories. ( See sidebar below for Smith's description of each demographic.) ... Everyone else in Texas is the opportunity. Everybody else in Texas has as much of a stake in the outcome of these big policy issues I've named. Health care, public education, higher education, transportation, energy, race, water—you name it. They all have a reason to care. They all have a reason to be engaged, but they're not being given a reason to be engaged. Once upon a time, the reason why they had to be engaged was that the media covered these issues, teed them up so that people would care about them enough to get out in the world, debate them, discuss them, solve them. Now they're not being teed up. The impetus for the Tribune is that the for-profit media are in a very difficult spot. We respect and honor the work they do—we think they're doing the best they can do, under unprecedented circumstances. Challenging circumstances. But it's not enough. There are gaps created by the contraction that has occurred, in the newspaper business particularly. They've lost people. They've lost pages. They've had to prioritize the things they cover, and by and large, when you have to prioritize in difficult economic circumstances you go to the things that can be monetized, commercialized. So you do Michael Jackson's memorial service, and you do college football, and you do the new Harry Potter movie, but maybe you don't do transportation. Maybe you don't do health care reform, unless something like the Tea Parties happen where you've got no choice but to do it. Maybe you don't do higher education. The fact is, all these problems are pressing for the state of Texas: the highest percentage of uninsured people in the country, ... lowest spending per capita on higher education in the South, (and) demographic inevitability upon us—we're about to be a Hispanic majority state, yet we are not prepared, even remotely, for the impact, the opportunity, but also the challenge that a Hispanic majority in this state represents in public education, health care and so on. Readers of the Tribune, as defined by Smith: The people who do work within two blocks of the Capitol—the hyper-insiders—are crucial. These are the people who eat, sleep, breathe, piss, shit this stuff. They don't have lives other than the lives they lead — they're the ones who think about this stuff first thing in the morning, and they go to bed thinking about it last thing at night. A circle out from those—you can think of this as concentric circles—are the people who work, say, from the University north to the lake south. They actually do have lives, they don't only do this, but it's germane to the professions they have, to the work lives they have. It may even be the fabric of their social lives. But at the end of the day, they go home and they can turn it off. It is hugely important to them, but it's not everything. A circle out from those people are, in fantasy baseball terms, not the team owners (or) players, but they care enough about the sport that they know all the statistics on the back of the baseball card. And every April, first week of the month, they're doing that fantasy baseball draft. They're not professionals—they're amateurs, but they're hyper-aware. They're hyper-articulate. These are the kind of people who don't have anything to do with the political environment at the Capitol, but who maybe work for law firms, or technology firms.... For them, it really matters, but it's not germane to their lives in any lives, other than that it's their chosen avocation. Single-issue people. People who—not necessarily in Austin, maybe in Dallas or Houston or Lubbock or Midland—care passionately about one issue. Maybe it's the Trans-Texas Corridor, and, by extension, transportation. Maybe it's the health care reform stuff that's happening in Congress ... Maybe it's higher education ... They care about that issue and they care deeply. They don't look left or right in their lives, in terms of other issues, but they need, really, a Baedeckers for navigating the capital community, the political scene, and policy scene in Texas. Well, you're absolutely right that these are issues that will matter—do matter—to everybody in Texas. At the same time, (it seems that) the reason why a lot of traditional print media is able to get people engaged (or) interested in reading in the first place, is that they're able to mix up the content. You're able to have some Arts and Entertainment coverage, Food and Drink coverage, mixed in with your political coverage — how would something like that work (here)? I'm not sure I agree with that. I don't think that the issue is that the for-profit media's success at presenting these issues has been about the fact that they're a whole range of topics. If you want a publication that's designed for everybody, there are plenty of places to go. We believe that the better way to present these issues is with the kind of depth, complexity, perspective, insight and context that comes from an undistracted focus. If we don't have to do Michael Jackson, and we don't have to do Colt McCoy, and we only have to do public policy and politics, we can provide compelling stories. The reality of what these big issues and other like (them) are like in Texas today, at a level of depth that gives people real insight into the challenges we face and the potential opportunities for solutions. We are nonpartisan. We are not doing an echo-chamber deal. There are plenty of places on the left and right to go and find those kind of partisan opinions. We do have a bias though, and our bias is in favor of Texas—in favor of the idea that Texas can be the very best state in the country, can be the very best place to live in the world, if we all are honest ... and civil enough with each other to debate the problems that we face openly, to lock our arms together and come up with solutions to those problems. Part of what I'm saying here is the path to the solution begins with presenting those problems at a level of complexity and depth that gives people a real understanding of them, and right now much of what they're getting — not all of it, because there are people who do a very good job — much of what they're getting, to the degree that it's being presented at all, is surface. We want to get below that. I think that part of the way that you get people is not by packaging it with stuff that's less important, or more exciting, part of the way that you attract people is by presenting stories in a compelling fashion. Serious doesn't necessarily mean boring. One of the failures of the media, I believe, as it has attempted to present these kinds of stories in the past, is that they resign themselves to having to be dry, not that interesting, boring — I actually believe that we can mix up with format, mix up with style, the way that we present this material. Evan Smith’s Twitter account Can you give me some examples of that? Across platforms. Fundamentally what the Tribune is going to produce is text, audio, video, databases of public information, proprietary polling, blogs, aggregation of other people's content, aggregation of the best blogs in Texas, mobile, social—all of the various ways to tell stories (and) to distribute stories. We want people to access content the way that they want it. This is an important point that I think a lot of my friends in the media ... talk about all the time: once upon a time, we in the business of creating content had all the power. We decided what content we created, we decided when, we decided how much of it, we decided the delivery device we gave it to you on, we decided the timing of that content, and we said, "You've gotta take it exactly as we present it, when we present it. You can't manipulate it. You can't have a little; you have to have all of it. It's like it or love it." Today the balance of power has shifted. Now the person who has the power in that equation is the consumer of content. Consumers want on-demand content, they want to get it when they want it, they want to get as much or as little of it as they want, they want to be able to manipulate it, (and) they want it across platforms: on television screens, over satellite radio, ... on a computer screen, on a conventional cellphone, ... on an iPhone. They want to get on their computer (and) blog about it, they want to embed video — And how much of all this do you use, personally? I use all of them. I see you're pretty active on your Twitter account. I'm active ... enough on Twitter. The thing about Twitter and Facebook, like so many other things in my life—I was a hater and then I became a zealot. Crab cakes and college football would be two (other) examples of that. I didn't believe that social media really had a place for me, and I came to believe quite the opposite—I believe that social media provides opportunities that don't really exist in other forms and formats. One of the great things about social media, for instance, is that it's about push. So much of what we in the media do is create this great content, and then sit back and wait for people to come to it. In the world that we live in today, push is a much more effective way of reaching people than pull. And frankly, it's an old idea—that you go to the people, you don't wait for them to come to you. We use social media in our lives as much as possible, to push content, and we're going to use (it) to present out content in ways that are interesting and compelling, and transcend the ways that those stories are typically told. Now there's some rumors of this new Apple Tablet that's coming out— Yeah, it's groovy, I saw something about it on Lifehacker yesterday— Fake Apple Tablet mockup, via Gizmodo This is being claimed as something that has the potential to change the industry altogether. Something that the Kindle tried to do — I'm actually a big Kindle user and believer in Kindle. What I'm not a believer in is paying for content on my Kindle that's free on the internet. The Tribune would never seek to charge for its content on a Kindle or any other device. Our whole thing is about ubiquity. We're not charging other media to run our content. We're essentially a free wire service for content; it's not even correct to refer to it as syndication in a literal sense, because we believe that the best root to success and in achieving our mission—greater engagement on these issues, civil and informed discourse about these big subjects—the road to achieving the success of that mission is paved with ubiquity. We believe that the way that we achieve our mission is by having our content in front of as many people as possible. We're going to be all over the place, flooding the zone with content; you're going to get sick of us before all this is over. A Kindle of a great way for us to distribute our content, but If you're going to make people pay for it, they're not going to pay for content that they can get for free. That's frankly ( knocks on table) what got the for-profit media in trouble in the first place. Eight years ago, they could have established a beachhead and said, "We charge you for our content in print, we're going to charge you a little less for our content online, because our overhead is different but our content still has value. We're not going to devalue it by not charging for it." "I think it's a hard deal to persuade somebody who's been getting content from you for free to have to pay for it. It's like the worst drug-dealer in history." They could have done that. Now (that) they don't charge for content, people like me have stopped buying newspapers, by and large, and if they want to come back to us suddenly and say, "Well, we're going to reverse that," we're going say, "Well, the genie is out of the bottle." So you think Rupert Murdoch's efforts to build paywalls around his sites are a bad idea? The Wall Street Journal started off as a pay site, and became enormously successful as a pay site, because they said, resolutely, at the very beginning, "We believe that there's enough value attached to our content that we're not going to veer from a pay model." And they proved—alone, really, among for-profit media—that you can have a pay site and make money and protect the value of your content. (But) it's very difficult to make the various genies who are now out of the bottle to go back in. I think it's a hard deal to persuade somebody who's been getting content from you for free to have to pay for it. It's like the worst drug-dealer in history. How does the Texas Weekly fit in, then? Well, we acquired Texas Weekly—it was an asset purchase—to incorporate the archives of Texas Weekly, which go back about fifteen years. It's a modern history of politics in Austin and Texas, and that archive will be searchable. We'll continue to publish a slightly tweaked version of Texas Weekly that will continue to be available for sale by subscription, for $250 a year. There are something like 1,200 subscribers now, and that becomes earned income for the Tribune. We believe we can grow the circulation beyond what it is, and it's related business income so there's no problem with our 501(c)3 status. Texas Weekly is a publication largely for insiders, a small subset of our group, and we believe that there is a value for premium content over and above — it's no different, frankly, than an app that has a Lite version and a Paid version. Now, our Lite version happens to be quite a bit richer and more robust than the average Lite version of an app. But if you want a different, deeper, more refined experience, if you're someone whose background or expertise or interests are deeper than that of the average person, you have to be willing to pay. So we're going to continue to ask people to pay for premium content. So this is really for those folks within two blocks of the Capitol. There are only 1,200 subscribers to the Texas Weekly, and they are almost entirely within that two-block radius. The free stuff will be plentiful, it will be robust. It'll be more than enough for (most). Would you say that it will 95% of your (total) content? It's 98%, 99% of our content. How does this fledgling publication cover our state to the extent that you're talking about? For one thing, we'll have eleven—including me—reporters and writers covering all the stuff on the day we launch. And, in fact, we may even have twelve by next Tuesday If I pull a few rabbits out of my hat. That's a lot of people—Texas Monthly, in all the years that I was there, had about that many staff writers covering the entire state. The fact is, you could really accomplish an enormous amount with that many people. The difference is, we're not having to cover barbecue, or college football, and crime, we're just covering politics upon politics. So we have a traditional beat system the way a traditional newspaper might, where certain people have certain subjects that they're responsible for. But everybody has the opportunity to write on every subject. So we'll cover the state very aggressively, but we'll cover the things that we are going to cover. We're not going to lose our focus. We're not going to stray away from the stuff that is our responsibility to cover, and that is something that I think is absolutely achievable. Back to this thing that you were promising early, this thing about nonpartisanship. Obviously, and this is a question that you get quite often: John Thornton of Austin Ventures ... I understand that he's publicly renounced his partisan (support). (Grins) He's renounced his previous ways. Nevertheless, having given almost a hundred thousand dollars to various political causes in the last three years- And a total of almost $200,000 over time- How do you make sure, then, that you're still keeping this nonpartisan perspective? Well, John's going to have absolutely nothing to do with the content of this publication, any more than Rupert Murdoch has to do with the news operation of the Wall Street Journal, or Mort Zuckerman has anything to do with the news operation of U.S. news, or David Bradley has to do with the Atlantic Monthly. These are all people with a giving history; it's widely known, it's available to be searched online, but at the end of the day, journalists are journalists, businessmen are businessmen, chairmen are chairmen. We have no interest in being part of a partisan publication. John will have no role from a content standpoint whatsoever, and so the insulation from John's past partisan giving is me. I am the roof over everyone's head, and believe me, that roof will not leak. So, San Francisco has a new $5 million nonprofit venture — Right, we were the ones out there on the edge of the plank with the most money, and then suddenly we woke up to find that we weren't. It's true. This is the move right now, this is the play. And there's one in San Diego— Voice of San Diego precedes us, then (there's) Minn Post in Minneapolis-St Paul, the St. Louis Beacon in St. Louis, the Gotham Gazette in new York. There are an awful lot of these nonprofit news ventures starting up—very few of them as well capitalized as ours, very few of them with the number of people working that we do, very few of them with the level of expertise on their staff that we have. But we respect their work. It's all in the service of the same idea. "I suspect that you'll see some kind of nonprofit news network that will arise in which we share content among our sites, where we provide aggregation of other content created by nonprofit news ventures elsewhere in the country." And to that point, is there a plan, or have you engaged in any kind of dialogue with these folks, to perhaps collaborate? Or create some sort of forum? Very smart question. Absolutely. We are in conversations with all these guys about the possibility of collaborating on individual projects (or) collaborating across time. I suspect that you'll see some kind of nonprofit news network that will arise in which we share content among our sites, where we provide aggregation of other content created by nonprofit news ventures elsewhere in the country. Ultimately what could happen—I don't have any reason to think that this is what's going to happen—but ultimately what could happen is you could see a national newspaper that publishes, comprised of content from the various regional nonprofit news ventures, aggregated under one brand. Where a nonprofit news service, to which we feed all of our content, ultimately builds a site that features content from the West Coast, the East Coast, the Midwest, the South—and suddenly you have a picture of the news nationally, built entirely by the staffs of nonprofit news ventures. It could happen. I'm not saying it will happen, I'm not even saying it should happen. But I think that you could very easily see a way to pull together the best of this content, plus ProPublica's content, and make it available to discerning consumers of aggressive, ambitious public interest journalism. So what is somebody from another city reads this, and thinks, this is a wonderful idea? Well, Dallas South news is a site that's already started up, and there's a fellow named Sean Williams who's very smart, who's built this publication online. I wouldn't be surprised If you saw versions of this spring up all over the place. The great thing about the internet is that there's a low barrier to entry. A low cost of entry. Without the overhead of print publication, of pages and postage and printing, really all your money goes into people. It goes into journalism. In our case, we have a budget in the first year of $1.6 million, second year $2 million, third year $2.3 (million). The operations funded by that money are entirely people and technology—very little overhead. Every dollar that comes in (goes) right back around and back into the business. From our standpoint, there's no better way to spend a small budget than on lots of people and letting them loose to go create great journalism. That's really what we can make happen on a very small budget. That is how with a $1.6 million budget in the first year, we can have a Capitol bureau that is larger than that of any newspaper in Texas. I believe that the secret to this is, don't spend money on things you don't have to, but by all means spend money on the things you need. We can afford to buy the best technology. We afford to hire reporters and pay them respectable salaries—nobody took a pay cut. Tribune pre-launch summit, via Facebook I heard some people got raises, actually. I would say a couple of people may have gotten incidental and nominal raises. But another thing that hasn't been reported is that everybody who came aboard took a pay cut, in the form of a deferral. Ross Ramsey and I each took 15%; everybody else took 10%. They deferred that for two years, into a bank account, and If you are with the Tribune at the end of the two years, you'll get back the full amount you've deferred. And if you leave before that? You'd get back a pro-rata share. But the point here is, it's a startup, it's a nonprofit. We want to put our faith in it, we want to reduce our payroll, reduce our costs initially, and show that we support the idea that this can be done. In fact, we've all done it very happily. And of this $4 million launch goal, how are you guys doing right now? Well, the goal has been $3.5 or $4 by the end of the year. We're at $3.6 right now, about six weeks ahead of schedule. I fully expect us to be at $4 or past $4 by the end of the year, and it's been through a combination of individual memberships, corporate sponsorships, foundation grants. We're at $1.1 in foundation grants so far, and $2.5 in individual gifts from all over the country and all over Texas. Increments of $50 on the lower end to $1 on the upper end. We have more than 1,000 founding members, more than 50 corporate sponsors, and we have more than 40 major donors who've given us at least $5,000. Of those 40, at least half have given us at least $25,000 or more. How are you getting the word out to let folks know? We're constantly, constantly out, on the phone, in meetings around Austin and Texas. We're aggressively fundraising, aggressively educating people on this, and that's not something that's going to stop on the day we launch; it's something we're going to continue to do. new York Times' Sulzberger said just last night that journalism "is in the midst of a massive transition," and then he went on to compare it to the Titanic (Fallacy).("Even if the Titanic came in safely to new York Harbor, it was still doomed," said Sulzberger. "Twelve years earlier, two brothers invented the airplane.") Here's what I think: every newspaper around the country is in a different situation. The big newspapers, the national newspapers—the Times, the Journal, USA Today, Washington Post—the true national papers that can claim to be national papers, are going to weather this just fine. It's the regional papers that are being much (harder) hit. Dallas news circulation is down more than 20%. Houston Chronicle circulation is down year-after-year more than 20%. The advertising that these guys carry, whether it's automotive or luxury retail, is significantly down from what it was a year before. We know that classified advertising has been hard hit by Craigslist and comparable sites online, which have really removed completely the third leg of their revenue generating stool (classified advertising, display advertising, circulation). How they all deal with it is just as different as the papers are different from one another. There's no question in my mind that Sulzberger's right, that we're witnessing a profound transition in the media business. But change has always been inevitable, whether it's in the media industry or any other. It's always been inevitable. The question is, does the the change own you, or do you own the change? The guys who have been proactive, not only in the media business but in any business, at anticipating the change that's coming, and reacting to it not with a combination of fear and denial and hostility, but viewing it as an opportunity to grow and evolve their business, those are the ones who survive and prosper. The ones who resist and retrench are the ones who are left behind. What I would say to any industry, to anybody in any business at a time of profound change, is, we're no longer talking about whether change is coming; change is here. The question is, what are you doing to own the change? And to prevent the change from owning you? In the for-project media, the smartest people—and I don't necessarily consider myself in this group—the smartest people I know are the ones who have looked at the landscape and said, "we can continue to do the good and the impactful and the meaningful work we've always done, but we have to acknowledge that what the audience for our great work wants is simply different than it was five or ten years ago. And if you produce the same work in the same formats with the same delivery mechanism and you don't sufficiently respond to the change that's coming, you're going to be left behind. And that's true in the magazine business, the newspaper business, or any business. So far, what's been your biggest challenge? So far it's been my impatience, and the impatience of the reporters. We're ready to unveil the site that we've built. We know what we're planning ... there's a lot of misperceptions out there, but ... the only way to disprove what a lot of people are thinking is to show it. So next Tuesday, a week from now, we'll be having a conversation based on your having seen the site, and seeing that we intend to live up to our promise of nonpartisan, aggressive, ambitious public interest journalism across multiple platforms. As much journalism and information and context as you can possibly stomach. Because honestly, it's not just about the news reporting. It's about the access to information that we're giving people, through the databases we're building, through the elected Officials directory, very very deep and complex. We've have an iPhone app that you'll be able to access on the very first day that's an elected Officials directory. We think that giving people the tools to be more productive and engaged and informed — that will be the most important thing we achieve, to allow people walk away from the experience they have at the Tribune, and be able to think better and more deeply about the issues that matter to all of us. The ’clunky piece of shit’ that was the Mac Plus And are you more of a Mac or a PC guy? I'm a Mac guy. I'm not more of (either): I-am-a-Mac-guy. I look at Justin Long and I look at John Hodgman, and I laugh, because I am absolutely in league with Justin Long in those commercials. I just think that the way that they have cast that choice speaks to me. I had a Mac Plus — my first computer was a Mac Plus, back in the mid eighties. It was this clunky piece of shit, the square deal with these big chunky keys, and I was hooked then and I'm hooked now. I believe that the Mac functionality is so much preferable to the PC stuff I've used and seen. I've been on both, involuntarily on both, but at home I've always been a Mac guy. We are absolutely Macbook Pro people at the Tribune. We're about to be on iTunes; we'll have all of our podcasts, all of our audio and video. We are in league with the Apple people, and if that makes us communists or whatever else, then we plead guilty. ( said with a big grin) Somebody walked to our office today and said, "I am so happy to see that you're Mac people." And I thought, was it even a question? There are a lot of people in this town ... (with) a lot of creative energy, and people are always trying to launch new things—whether it's a big venture such as yours or a small mom-and-pop shop. Whatever the case is, what's your advice to them, these people who are just trying to make 'it' happen? Don't take no for an answer. The fact is, there are a lot of people in this world who are No people by default. If something seems too hard, their answer is no. If something escapes the level of complexity that they're comfortable with, they say no. If something requires them to exert effort, they say no. Entrepreneurs are inherently Yes people, not No people, and when you encounter No people you have to blow past them. You can't be swayed by negative energy. You can't allow people whose default answer is 'no' to change your essentially positive and optimistic attitudes. Entrepreneurs are about doing, and not about not doing. If you want to start a business, if you want to start a website, if you want to start anything at all, you've got to be in the business of Yes. If we had allowed people who were skeptical about us, or who didn't see the value of the business model that we built, who said "how can you make a nonprofit business model work?", who said "nobody cares about public interest journalism"—if we had listened to those people, none of us would've left our jobs. None of us would ever have built the Tribune. It may be that many of our assumptions may ultimately be proven wrong about the Tribune, but you know what? ... I would much rather try for something great and fail at it, than not try out of fear, or because I gave to the culture of No. I'm a Yes guy, not a No guy. Add to digg Email this Article Add to Facebook Add to Google