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 — […]
Tag: Journalism
Posted inCulture
I Learned a Whitewashed Version of Texas History in School. Journalism Taught Me the Stories That Got Left Out.
I still remember my last high school football game on the Red Oak Hawkette drill team. I was 17, and our dance group had spent hours rehearsing in our maroon leotards and bright white ankle boots with mini silver bolo ties on the side. We wore nude dance tights and white hats with matching maroon […]
Posted inCulture
Journalists Are Just as Fucked Up as Everyone Else. Admitting It Might Help Us Save Democracy.
I was sitting in the florescent haze of a conference room in New Orleans this June when something snapped in my chaotic brain. Thousands of journalists had descended like locusts on a Canal Street Marriott for the annual Investigative Reporters & Editors conference which, in my opinion, is the best (if most pretentious) gathering in […]
Posted inEditor's Letter
Best of The Barbed Wire 2024: Video Games, Peyote Gardens, and Millennial Revolutions
In the four months since we launched, we have (hopefully!) made you laugh and think with clever and hard stories. In 2024, over 123 working days, our small team of three full-time editors published approximately 252 stories under 29 bylines — short and long; silly and serious; essays, features, and exclusives. The majesty, absurdity, diversity, […]