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In the beginning, Wes Turner, longtime former publisher of the Star-Telegram and an organizer of an informal downtown business group worried about years of decline in local news coverage of Fort Worth, referred to his effort as the “Coalition of the Concerned.”
The group included the lawyer Dee Kelly, Jr.; former Tandy Corp. CEO John Roach; former mayors Mike Moncrief and Kenneth Barr; Mike Berry, president of the AllianceTexas developer Hillwood; Pete Geren, president of the Sid Richardson Foundation; John Robinson, executive vice president of grant administration for the Amon G. Carter Foundation; and the consultant Chris Gavras, president of The CG Group, Turner and businessman Bill Meadows, who joined the effort later, confirmed Thursday.
Bill Meadows
“It was just concerned citizens,” Meadows said in a phone interview. “Their basic concerns were of Fort Worth not getting adequate information regarding local institutions of government. Water district. City Hall. County government. The school district, even. Fundamentally, these (unbiased news coverage) are things our citizens have always relied upon to be good citizens.”
Thursday, the fruit of the coalition’s efforts, the nonprofit Fort Worth Report, took the wraps off of its launch plan, the source of curiosity in the city’s business and civic community for months, announcing it planned to launch digital publication as early as April. The organization, a 501©3, announced it hired its first publisher and CEO, Chris Cobler, former editor and publisher of the Victoria Advocate newspaper in South Texas.
The Fort Worth Report also announced the first members of its launch board, including Turner and Meadows, who will serve as co-chairs: the lawyer Marianne Auld of Kelly Hart & Hallman, who succeeded Kelly as managing partner; entrepreneur Jonathan Morris; Visit Fort Worth executive vice president and former journalist Mitch Whitten; and the retired Associated Press executive John Lumpkin, who began his career at the Star-Telegram.
Turner, Meadows and Cobler said in interviews Thursday they’re seeking more board members and want a diverse lineup. They also plan to form a reader advisory council.
The Fort Worth Report’s impending launch had been the subject of heightened speculation since the group recently announced it received a seed grant from the Burnett Foundation. The group declined earlier to specify the amount of the grant, but Turner, Meadows and Cobler confirmed in the interviews Thursday it is for $1.25 million over two years.
Wes Turner
That’s enough to open the doors, they said. But they made clear the nonprofit won’t succeed without the support of Fort Worth.
“We have all the funds we need to launch, but we cannot sustain this effort without public and private support,” Turner said in emailed responses to questions Thursday night.
Meadows, Turner and Cobler said the organization is still working on determining a desired, continuing annual budget.
Fort Worth Report plans to launch with six staff members, Cobler said. “The plan is to start with myself, a chief development officer, who we already have an agreement with, a managing editor, and three reporters,” Cobler said.
The focus will be on coverage of government and education, and, to a lesser extent, arts and culture, Cobler, Meadows and Turner said. Fort Worth Report has posted openings on its web site for full-time reporters covering government, education, and arts and culture, and for freelancers.
“The niche is local news that provides government accountability,” Cobler said. “We’re certainly not trying to be all things to all people, like a daily newspaper.”
Fort Worth Report, for example, won’t cover crime news or sports. Assuming the Fort Worth Report launches in April, upcoming mayor, City Council, and school board races are subjects the Fort Worth Report is interested in, Cobler said. The Fort Worth Report is also interested in looking into the 2017 findings of city and Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce economic development plans, Cobler said, that have prompted a re-assessment of the city’s strengths and weaknesses.
Chris Cobler
Fort Worth Report's content will be available for free republication to other news organizations.
“We’re responding to the decline of, and the volume of, local news,” Cobler said. “We’re just one player in that sphere. The more local journalism we can produce, the better Fort Worth and Tarrant County will be.”
Meadows, a D/FW Airport board member and former chair, ex-Fort Worth City Councilman, and ex-Texas Department of Transportation commissioner, said, “what I know from the other side of the table from journalists is that, in fact, good journalism makes governance better. It just does. If you build the level of accountability into local government that comes with adequate, in-depth coverage, fair and balanced, we end up with better institutions of government.”
The Fort Worth Report organizers went to school on other nonprofit models, such as the Texas Tribune, and the San Antonio Report, the former Rivard Report created by Bob Rivard, ex-editor of the San Antonio Express-News newspaper. Meadows, a director of the Sumners Foundation in Dallas, a longtime supporter of the Tribune, said he spent an afternoon with Rivard in San Antonio.
The organization has also studied nonprofit journalism models in cities like San Diego, San Francisco’s East Bay, and Memphis, Tenn.
“Nonprofit news represents one of the few bright spots in the journalism sector, with hundreds of public service news outlets springing up during the past five years,” Mary Walter-Brown, CEO of News Revenue Hub, a national consulting firm that conducted research for the coalition, said in the release this week announcing the rollout.
One tenet the coalition learned: narrow focus.
It expects fundraising will be “a challenge,” Meadows said. “Let’s make no mistake about it. We’re going to rely on the citizens of Fort Worth to recognize – and I believe we will provide – a quality of product that’s going to be worth the citizens of Fort Worth supporting financially.”
The Fort Worth Report has received contributions as word spread about its startup, Meadows said. The organization expects to pursue funding from foundations, individuals, sponsorship and advertising, events, earned income, “and all the different kinds of things you can do,” Cobler said.
“From Day One, we’re going to be out fundraising,” he said. “It really goes back to how much can you get from your members, how much can you generate from foundations, how much can you get form corporate sponsorship and advertising. The good thing is we don’t come into with the cost of a legacy print operation.”
Asked whether the organization’s directors have made gifts, Turner said, “I have pledged support. I will not speak for the other board members but we expect all board members to support us. We will not be very successful in raising other support if we are not invested ourselves.”
Asked about the continued interest of the original Coalition of the Concerned, Meadows said, “they remain interested and actively involved. At the outset, a board of directors has to be smaller and nimble, and ability to move quickly is important. We want to make sure that our board is truly inclusive and reflective of the diversity of this community, and we are working toward that end.”
The Coalition of the Concerned began meeting two years ago, Turner said. Meadows said he joined the conversations about six months later.
The conversations at times intersected with other organizations interested in forming nonprofit journalism entities in Fort Worth. The former journalist and longtime advertising and PR executive and businesswoman, Linda Pavlik, formed a 501©3 nonprofit called The News Tribune, an homage to a local paper she bought in 1986. Richard Connor, owner of the Fort Worth Business Press and former publisher of the Star-Telegram, also announced he would pursue the formation of a local journalism nonprofit called the Fort Worth Press.
The Coalition of the Concerned also approached the Star-Telegram about the potential of raising money to augment journalism at the paper, Meadows and Turner confirmed. The Star-Telegram has hired reporters under a partnership with the nonprofit Report for America.
“There were conversations where we were exploring what the options were,” Meadows said. “Our goal was to ensure the citizenry of Fort Worth had all of the information it could get to develop good and informed options. So, of course, we had conversations with the Star-Telegram. I think we ultimately decided a Fort Worth news initiative that was 100% Fort Worth-driven gave the citizenry ownership of the initiative. We thought that was a better model.”
Using gifts contributed by the Burnett, Richardson, and Carter foundations, and other coalition members, the group hired News Revenue Hub to conduct research into what potential readers would be interested in. The coalition did not disclose the sum of those gifts.
“Researchers heard from residents who participated in polling and focus groups that they wanted more solutions-oriented reporting and more news about their communities and less news of crime reports, entertainment-type superficial tidbits or incremental governmental bodies’ actions,” the Fort Worth Report said in this week’s release. “They wanted assurance that reporters knew about the communities they cover.”
Olaf Growald
This week’s release levered the profiles of some of Fort Worth’s most prominent people.
“Educated residents are engaged and often become leaders in the community,” Mayor Betsy Price said in it. “A news organization like the Fort Worth Report can make a difference because it empowers our residents to know more so they can do more. As they say, knowledge is power.”
Neils Agather, executive director of the Burnett Foundation, said its late president, Anne Marion, “loved Fort Worth, her hometown. She felt that in order to have a great city, you needed to have excellent reporting of the activities of the City Council and the city agencies, as well as the activities of all our elected and appointed officials. She had the hope and expectation that Fort Worth Report would accomplish that goal.”
The Fort Worth Report last fall began a search for its first publisher. Cobler said he learned of it via Lumpkin. The two knew each other from their work with the Headliners Foundation, Cobler said. “The level of support, right off the bat, from the Burnett Foundation” attracted him, he said.
Cobler was the first Donald W. Reynolds Nieman Fellow for community journalism at Harvard University, in 2006, and was president of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas. The Texas Daily Newspaper Association in 2018 gave Cobler its editorial achievement award, in recognition of courage and commitment to the newsroom and leadership in the community, in advocating and pursuing openness and accessibility to government. Cobler was honored for a series on law enforcement in Victoria County. Cobler told readers in a social media post in June that, due to COVID-related financial pressures, the Advocate eliminated his job and he’d been laid off.
“I’ve been wanting to be a part of something like this for a good long while,” Cobler said of the Fort Worth Report. “We all know how the for-profit business model has been disrupted.”