I’m of two minds about this. Yes, Gannett continues to seek blood from stones, but Austinites had largely stopped expecting much out of the Statesman under prior owner Cox, which among other moves contracted with GateHouse in 2015 to design features sections – the only time I’ve ended up involved in putting out the local paper despite not working for the company that published it – for the AAS as well as other dailies and weeklies.
It’s important to put in context that we are talking about a sliver of time in an overall trend that goes back more than two decades and had already robbed award-winning newsrooms of much of their cachet because of reader-facing decisions. This is not the final straw; the camel has been dead for years, and corporate journalism is engaged in taxidermy.
I’ve been in Austin for nine years at this point. And despite working in a newsroom-adjacent position for half of that time, I’ve never heard anyone say “Did you read today’s paper?”
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She spent the next two days interviewing bereaved family members and attending press conferences about the mass shooting, in which nineteen students and two teachers lost their lives.
Investigative journalist Tony Plohetski obtained surveillance-camera footage from inside the school that showed hundreds of heavily armed officers waiting in the hallways for 77 minutes before confronting the gunman—demolishing the official narrative of a heroic police response.
After a Texas House committee released its report on the tragedy, Statesman executive editor Manny Garcia assembled a team to produce a Spanish translation within three days.
In 2021 Axios, a well-funded news start-up based in Arlington, Virginia, launched its Austin daily newsletter, written by former Statesman reporters Nicole Cobler and Asher Price.
“We don’t want it to feel or read like a traditional news product.” Former Business Insider reporter Katie Canales and former Houston Chronicle newsletter writer Cat DeLaura have been hired to write for Austin Daily.
After spending two fruitless years attempting to negotiate a contract with Gannett, the union organized a one-day strike on June 5 to call attention to low pay and poor working conditions.
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