The Texas Tribune gets it

The New York Times had an interesting piece about the Texas Tribune, a not-for-profit news organization that launched last week to quite a bit of buzz in new media circles. The Trib’s buzz has come from its unique business model: a mix of entrepreneurship, donations, premium content, and other revenue sources to create a product that is targeted to and paid for by a select audience.

It reminds me a bit of what they’re trying to do with Minnesota Public Radio, and indeed a colleague in my department said that the Trib’s model reminds him of a radio model that has worked internationally for years.

The Trib’s model interests me as a scholar and a journalist. The welcome change of the past few years is that we’ve stopped trying to save newspapers, which may not have ever been possible anyhow, and instead focused on figuring out how to try and save journalism. Newspapers can come and go, but American democracy is built on the notion that citizens need information to be self-governing. The re-emerging partisan press, while not mutually exclusive to a robust public debate, has weaknesses that are best addressed by a strong independent press. Read more