When I moved back to Austin to start The Barbed Wire, I was an investigative reporter by trade, and I’d written a book, but I had never managed a team, never created an editorial calendar, never even been a full-time editor.
The joke we tell is that I Dick Cheney’d myself into this position — which for young readers means that I was hired to recruit someone for editor-in-chief then I ended up in the role myself.
But the truth is that I was terrified I wasn’t ready. And even though everyone we spoke to unanimously agreed this thing should exist, very few people were willing to fund it, and nobody was willing to run it.
When it came time to choose — either letting go of this dream newsroom I kept fantasizing about or just doing the job myself imperfectly — there was only ever really one choice. Though I have to imagine the Anna Wintours and Evan Smiths of the world are born to be editors-in-chief, I’ve been assured most of us fear we aren’t ready.
Yet somehow, I had this absurd, irrational hope that I could create a newsroom unlike any I’d worked in before. I can’t tell you how many times in my career someone told me not to take a risk. Not to become a journalist, not to move for a job at The Waco Tribune-Herald, not to risk it all on a startup in a collapsing industry.
When someone doesn’t think a story I want to tell matters, it doesn’t make me hopeless. It makes me angry at the fact that I can see something so clearly that they can’t.
Anyway, as my parents can tell you, I’ve always been stubborn. And I just knew in my bones that we could make Texas’ journalistic ecosystem more robust, more diverse, and more accessible to younger, even news-avoidant readers.
So we spent more than a year planning and fundraising, and then we launched exactly 589 days ago.
We miraculously scraped together just enough money to launch a newsroom. Not a well-staffed one with a luxurious runway, but one made of duct tape and shoestring where everyone wears many hats, works long hours, and cares deeply — personally — about the work.
The fact that I somehow recruited this team — some of the best journalists and kindest people I’ve ever met — to join me is the ONLY reason we’re still standing.
And frankly, none of us would be here without our families, friends, supportive spouses, readers, and members.
Thanks to all of you, as of this morning, this team has pitched, written, edited, fact-checked, illustrated, built, and published 703 stories.
The Barbed Wire has forced me to grow as a reporter, a person, a writer, an editor. And the stories our little team has published have been the most important ones of my career.
Heavyweight investigations on men in power, charities that broke promises, radioactive waste buried under elementary schools, and white supremacists running for office. Stories about Black joy and school voucher policies. Devastating floods, the value of PBS, and stories of immigrants — including children and 2-month-old babies — who’ve been cruelly detained by federal immigration authorities despite committing no crimes. Interviews with wrestlers, political strategists, and drag queens. Essays on love, loss, and community. The experience of taking — and becoming addicted to — synthetic heroin. The free speech crisis for Black Americans and the journalists who’ve been seized by ICE.
We’re not objective when we’re writing about a state we love. I’m an eighth generation Texan. My grandpa was in oil. I went to grade school with girls who attended Camp Mystic. Senior editor Brian Gaar writes about education policy while his kids attend Texas schools. Deputy Managing Editor Leslie Rangel is about seven months pregnant, writing about pregnancy loss and kids in danger. Our staff is personally affected by racism, by dangerous anti-abortion laws, by homophobia. And we feel a duty to tell true stories about our friends, neighbors, and communities. To bear witness to both the joy and pain.
I happen to think our diversity, vulnerability, and tenacity defines us for the better.
We have had tremendous successes, which I’ll happily expand on, but you simply cannot imagine how many rejections we had to get through to make it here. Rejected fellowships, grants, funding pitches, interview requests, people we wanted to hire who said no, you name it. A lot of folks told us to our faces they didn’t believe what we envisioned was even possible, however noble of a goal it was.
But through sheer force of will, we have held onto a ferocious, maybe even delusional sense of hope for 589 days and counting.
And in that time, more than one million people have clicked on our stories.
And despite all those rejections, we have had real, tangible impact. Our antics, reporting, and writing have been featured in MSNBC, Condé Nast, Harvard’s Nieman Lab, NPR, CNN’s Reliable Sources, Politico, The Washington Post, The Guardian, every major local city paper in the state, and many more. We have been on the front pages of Apple News, on Monica Lewinsky’s Instagram page, shared by GLAAD, the ACLU, but also the University of Texas’ athletic director.
We’ve partnered with so many newsrooms, including student papers, and the Pulitzer-winning Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University and we’re working now on a piece for which we received a grant from the Pulitzer Center, in collaboration with Wired magazine.
Our team has guest lectured at the University of Texas and moderated a forum for the Democratic National Committee. We’ve been panelists at investigative journalism conferences, the Greater Austin Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, abortion convenings, and this year, for the first time, SXSW.
But as proud as I am of these accomplishments, we would not be able to keep going without a steady stream of that absurd, irrational hope.
Hope that we can tell more untold stories, shine more light on injustice, inform more communities, and elicit more laughs.
Hope, as someone once said, is the “certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”
That’s how I’ve felt about this newsroom from the very beginning.
The grim reality is that we need reader support to make it to our second anniversary in September.
But if we went under tomorrow, it would have been worth it to learn from these colleagues, tell these stories, impact these sources’ lives, and make these impossible things happen. To make something that felt worthy of the generosity and attention of readers, colleagues, friends, and family like all of you.
Thank you for showing up for us — and for proving to me that I was right to be hopeful the whole time.
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