The Texas Tribune tallied 23,011,098 in 2010, averaging slightly more than 1.917 million per month, and the site totaled 3,970,635 visits by 2,209,958 unique visitors, or more than 184,000 per month. Its average number of page views per visit was 5.8, and 70 percent of its traffic came from Texas, with 23 percent from the state capital of Austin. Smith wrote:
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In the final segment of our Media Beat interview, I spoke with Texas Tribune CEO and editor-in-chief Evan Smith about the nonprofit news organization’s business model.
Because the Tribune does not receive advertising, Smith said, it relies on “five buckets” of revenue: membership, major donors, foundations, corporate sponsorship, and earned income through events and premium products like newsletters. And, despite what he calls “the Nick Denton legacy” of online news, the Tribune will never pay its writers based on their page views.
“Nobody took a pay cut when they left their jobs to come and work for the Tribune,” Smith said. “One of the benefits of raising enough money to do a real operation was we could pay honest to goodness real journalists a real wage. Journalists deserve a living wage, not to be nickel and dimed on the basis of traffic.”
Clean out that inbox, Evan. I have a feeling lots of laid-off journos may soon be relocating to Texas.
Is it possible to throw out all personal biases and values and do truly objective reporting about the government?
Evan Smith, CEO and editor-in-chief of Texas Tribune, thinks so. The news organization has had success by offering quality journalism and comprehensive databases of public records. And, at almost one year in, Smith says the site remains beholden only to the citizens.
“People just assume the media is liberal. That’s just sort of taken as a fact, not a question,” he said in our Media Beat interview. “We’re not a bunch of communists. We’re not a bunch of socialists. We’re just good, hard-working journalists who believe that Texas can do better for its people than it is. That’s not a Republican thing or a Democratic thing. The only bias we have is in favor of Texas.”
Amidst all the hullabaloo about the Web killing print magazines, newspapers, reading, and our brain cells in general, a new site has quietly been making waves with… actual journalism.
Texas Tribune is a nonprofit online organization that focuses on public policy, politics, government, and other hard news topics that advertisers — and let’s be real, most readers — don’t want to support. In our Media Beat interview, CEO and editor-in-chief Evan Smith said he launched the initiative to fill that void.
“The problems of Texas like everyplace else are as big as ever, and we need that kind of coverage regardless of whether there’s a for-profit model to support it,” Smith explained. “So, we said let’s go out and raise money from generous people who give to causes all the time and see if we can’t support a nonprofit alternative to providing public service journalism.”
So, what has the print vet learned about the new media world thus far: “When you publish something online, that’s when the magic begins.”
Evan Smith, CEO and editor-in-chief of nonprofit, nonpartisan news site The Texas Tribune, shared some of the site’s statistics for 2010 in a post titled Lots of Good News in the Trib’s 2010 Analytics.
