The Midweek #63: San Antonio's Nonprofit News Organizations Join Forces
If you missed Tuesday’s announcement by Texas Public Radio and the San Antonio Report, the two are joining forces on July 1, a significant change in the local media landscape and what could be a harbinger of the future for nonprofit news organizations everywhere.
Texas Public Radio President and CEO Ashley Alvarado and San Antonio Report CEO Ashley Mock joined me in the bigcitysmalltown podcast studio on Tuesday to go beyond the day’s press release to share more details about the joint operating agreement. That episode will be available Friday morning and we invite you to watch on our YouTube channel, or listen in wherever you access your podcasts.
Alvarado and Mock said the new newsroom led by the Report’s Editor-in-Chief Leigh Munsil and the TPR’s Vice President for News Dan Katz will together deploy 31 journalists in the city and region. Given that San Antonio continues to occupy a top spot in the list of fastest growing U.S. cities, there can’t be too many journalists, especially after years of retrenchment by the San Antonio Express-News and the newsrooms at the network affiliate broadcast stations here.
The two entities will continue to be challenged to serve an increasingly fractured body politic separating people who identify as Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal. Many on both sides either do not trust the entities they lump together as “the media,” or they struggle to separate fact from fiction in a world dominated by social media channels and daily dishes of disinformation.
Nonprofit local journalism is one of the few sectors of journalism that has grown robustly in the last decade, and I would argue, community-based journalism remains the most trustworthy and free of bias.
Alvarado and Mock said they have raised a seven-figure sum from local philanthropists, family foundations, and corporate supporters who support the merger, and that the initial reaction to the news has been very positive. If you want to support their work and are not yet a contributing member, you can make your donation via TPR here or via the Report here.
169. Don Graham’s Visit to San Antonio and Our Lady of the Lake University
I was honored to record a special edition of bigcitysmalltown last week at the Our Lady of the Lake University’s podcast studio with President Dr. Abel Antonio Chávez and Don Graham, the retired chairman of the Washington Post Company and former publisher of the Washington Post. Graham was at OLLU to deliver the commencement address to graduates and their families. He has been a longtime philanthropic supporter of higher education students in Washington DC and beyond, and focuses his support on first-generation higher ed students. Given the profile of OLLU students as overwhelmingly people of color, first generation university-goers, his giving to a San Antonio institution is particularly newsworthy.
The Graham family remains one of the great American newspaper publishing families in the post-World War II era, a time when journalism reached its apex in this country. The Washington Post Company also owned Newsweek magazine where I worked first as a foreign correspondent in the 1980s and later as a senior editor and its chief of correspondents based in New York. Don and his mother, the legendary Katharine Graham, are two of the people I hold highest in terms of who I have had the privilege and honor of working for and with in my career, and it was a joy to share a conversation with him and OLLU President Dr. Chávez.
I hope you’ll listen.
Host, bigcitysmalltown
Robert “Bob” Rivard is a veteran American journalist whose 46-year career has taken him across Texas, Latin America, and beyond. He co-founded the Rivard Report (later named the San Antonio Report) with his wife, Monika Maeckle, in 2012, building it into the city’s leading nonprofit news organization before retiring in 2022.
Bob has worked for five Texas newspapers, beginning his career on the border at the Brownsville Herald, then moving to the Corpus Christi Caller, the Dallas Times-Herald, and later serving as a foreign correspondent and chief of correspondents for Newsweek. He returned to Texas as senior editor of the San Antonio Light before becoming executive editor of the San Antonio Express-News (1997–2011).
His journalism has earned widespread recognition, including being named Editor & Publisher’s “Editor of the Year” in 2000 and receiving the prestigious Maria Moors Cabot Award from Columbia University for his reporting on Latin America and the U.S.-Mexico border.
He is the author of Trail of Feathers, a nonfiction book chronicling the disappearance and murder of journalist Philip True in Mexico’s Sierra Madre. The book, published by Public Affairs in 2005, was widely reviewed, excerpted in Esquire, and selected by People magazine as one of five recommended nonfiction works that year.
Bob now hosts bigcitysmalltown, a podcast featuring the people shaping San Antonio’s future. He and Monika live in Southtown, where she runs the Texas Butterfly Ranch blog and previously founded the annual San Antonio Monarch Butterfly and Pol…Read More
