Mission Note

I write you all this morning with a bit of news: At the end of May, I’ll head over to The Texas Observer, where I will serve as that venerable publication’s publisher. I’m also pleased to say that the Austin Monitor will be in good hands. Ashley Fisher, who many of you know from both […]

I have a bit of news, but first I want to be sure that we’re all on the same page with regard to terminology and philosophy. The Austin Monitor employs a paymeter (stay with me here, it’ll be worth it) to control access to our stories. We do this because we need to pay our […]

How’s this for a morning duh: Diversity is nothing but good for a newsroom. Without it, we can’t well claim to cover every possible angle of a story. Your Monitor has a bit of work to do on our cultural diversity efforts. We’re working on that. We are proud to report, however, that we do […]

December 2016 marks the third anniversary of the rebranding that gave birth to the Austin Monitor. In those three years, we’ve rebuilt our web home, expanded our coverage, made room for some new voices in the coverage of Austin and Travis County politics and seen the growth of our publication from just 406 subscribers in […]

When we started this project, we envisioned a regular beat of these Publisher’s Notes — maybe once every two months or so. This is my second in about three weeks. So, if you’d like a rough “exciting times” metric for your Austin Monitor, this would be it. The times, they are exciting. For starters, if […]

Last week, your Austin Monitor team tried something new. From the start, we’d planned on building an events series to further our mission of civic engagement. Our thinking was that direct outreach might more directly impact our readers (and earn us a few more eyeballs along the way). That happened. Thanks to the generosity of […]

A couple of small changes, more Web sponsorships, and some event announcements to get to here: First: We’re moving Whispers. Not far, just behind a new button that you’ll find on the front page of the site. We’ve struggled a bit to figure out the section’s place in our now-not-so-new home. Those who remember the […]

I was recently given the advice that such phrasing as “let me be honest” or “honestly” implies that everything else one’s said is not, and so I won’t begin this note that way. Instead I’ll try this: I wasn’t quite sure if we’d be here to greet you all on New Year’s Eve 2015. I […]