The Sunday New York Times has a fascinating article by David Carr on The Texas Tribune, a 12-person web-based news operation dedicated to covering “the politics and policy of Texas state government.”

How focused is the staff on this mission? So much that it decided not to cover last Thursday’s deadly shootings at Fort Hood, just 82 miles or so north of Austin — right next door in Texas scale.

“It wasn’t our story. Should we have just been one more news organization rushing to Fort Hood? I don’t think so,” said (Matt) Stiles, who joined the Web site from The Houston Chronicle.

It was an important early test of how dedicated the web site is to its mandate. Debuting last week, The Texas Tribune is led by former Texas Monthly editor Evan Smith and staffed primarily by newspaper refugees. Here, as Carr writes, is what sets the site apart from most news organizations:

The Tribune is a nonprofit attempt to use a mix of donations, sponsorships, premium content and revenue from conferences to come up with a sustainable model for journalism that neither depends on nor requires a print product. …

The theory is that a group of well-compensated editors and writers (including Mr. Smith, who makes $315,000, with 15 percent of it deferred for two years) will create valuable reporting shared by citizens and other news media outlets, a kind of digital version of public radio.

Obviously it’s too early to tell how this will play out, but so far The Texas Tribune has scraped together $3.7 million in donations from private investors, a venture capitalist, the Houston Endowment and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Carr writes.

But it’s not all just straight reporting and sober analysis: The Texas Tribune has some fun with it. Below is a video of a new site feature called Stump Interrupted, based on the old VH1 show Pop-up Video: