By Ellen Clegg
Sonal Shah, the CEO of The Texas Tribune, announced last Friday that she will step down in December after just under three years in the nonprofit’s top job. In a post on the Tribune website, she wrote: “This decision is deeply personal: As the primary caretaker for my parents, I need to be closer to them and will be moving back to Houston.”
Her announcement is heartfelt, but her impending departure marks yet another jolting transition for a news outlet that launched in November 2009 with a sweeping ambition: to prop up democracy by transforming news coverage throughout the Lone Star State. But nonprofit news sites, which are usually supported by a mix of revenue streams, are not immune to challenging market forces and workplace issues like layoffs and union drives.
The Tribune is no exception. Fiscal reports filed with the Internal Revenue Service for 2021, 2022 and 2023 show net income losses for 2021 and 2023, according to 990 forms filed on ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer. The latest report available, for 2023, illustrates the scope. The revenue line is impressive, showing slightly more than $15 million — the envy of many news operations, whether for-profit or nonprofit.
More than 89% of that — $13.5 million — is from charitable contributions, a sign of considerable fund-raising prowess and robust community engagement. Program services brought in more than $1 million at an outlet known for its nationally recognized Texas Tribune Festival. In addition, the Tribune reports that it has 12,000 members who pay a set amount in order to receive a special newsletter and other perks. But the Tribune’s expenses outstripped revenue by more than $600,000, and though executive compensation was trimmed during the lean years, in 2023 the seven top executives took home six-figure salaries, according to the 990.
In January 2024, after enduring a first-ever wave of layoffs, the staff of the Tribune announced a move to unionize. As Sarah Scire of Nieman Lab reported at the time, 90% of eligible staffers signed union authorization cards, and 86% signed a mission statement that asked Sewell Chan, then the editor-in-chief, and Shah to voluntarily recognize the NewsGuild-CWA. Shah wrote at the time that the Tribune would respect their right to representation, and in February Tribune employees became members of Media Guild of the West, TNG-CWA.
“We went from sí se puede to sí se pudo,” El Paso-based reporter Uriel García said at the time. “Now we can negotiate a contract that can provide some worker protections so the employees of the Tribune can continue to provide quality journalism to Texans.”
Chan, a well-regarded journalist at The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times, left the Tribune in June 2024 to return to his home base in New York City, becoming the top editor at the Columbia Journalism Review. Chan’s successor as editor-in-chief, Matthew Watkins, has been with the Tribune since 2015. (In unrelated news, the Tribune and other media recently reported that another founder, financier John Thornton, died late last month.)
In our book, “What Works in Community News,” I profiled the Tribune and interviewed both Chan and then-CEO Evan Smith, who is now a senior adviser to Emerson Collective, a nonprofit founded by Laurene Powell Jobs that is working to buttress local news outlets across the country. Dan and I also interviewed Shah last year on our “What Works” podcast.
The Tribune hasn’t trimmed its sails in terms of ambition. It has bureaus beyond Austin, in communities like Lubbock, Lufkin and Odessa, and just announced that five Texas media outlets will join a years-old Tribune-ProPublica collaboration to bring more investigative journalism to Texas. But at a time when gyrations in national and international financial markets could challenge nonprofit giving at all levels, let’s hope that the Tribune can find a solid path forward.
