Austin at Large: Suffering With the Statesman

Ragging on the daily isn’t as much fun now, but sometimes it still needs to happen


The former Statesman headquarters on South Congress, aka the Batcave (Courtesy of Michael Barera)

Twenty-odd years ago, when I was on this desk the first time and Kirk Watson was mayor (for the first time?), there was serious bad blood between this newspaper and that other newspaper in the Batcave on South Congress. Both of us were growing and flexing our muscles, and the alt-weeklies of our generation were at their peak power within the media landscape all over the continent, and part of being an "alt" was being an alternative to the mainstream media, and part of being "mainstream" was presenting yourself as inherently more credible and trustworthy than those opinion-riddled free weeklies. (The fact that we were free and the Statesman was not, they said, proved we were crap, because you get what you pay for and whatnot. It was a simpler time.)

Today, all news has become free, which has obviously hurt the daily more than us, and nobody wants to pay what people used to pay for ad space in print media, which is a tide that has swamped all boats. So both of our papers are leaner and probably wiser than we were in the bubbly Aughts. I still think the local City Hall and Capitol press corps are more collaborative than competitive now, and our relationships are generally respectful.

But that doesn't mean that there will never be an occasion again to stick a pin in the daily's ass in this column space. Indeed, such an occasion – actually, two occasions – has arisen this very week.

"Gotcha!" Is a Kids Game

Both stories that I think the Statesman has handled very badly this week are being covered by the same reporter, but that's beside the point, as he is speaking with the classic "watchdog journalism" voice of local news media; it could have been any number of Statesman reporters over the years. A lot of folks expect the Chronicle to use that same aggro voice, given the alt-weeklies' oppositional stance toward authority and embrace of structural progressive change in our communities. But we think life in Austin is interesting enough as it is, without us creating drama needlessly. We already have a voice; we just need to tell the true story.

Not so at the daily, which tried very hard in the lead-up to Council's adoption of the fiscal year 2023 budget last week (see p.12) to create drama, division, and scandal over our City Hall leaders and their 40% pay raise. (There's even video of this earth-shattering event: "Watch Austin City Council vote to give themselves $33,000 pay raise.") As we note this week, this constituted a 0.008% increase in the "all funds" budget, costing each and every Austin taxpayer and ratepayer about a quarter. (A market study found all the City Hall staff are underpaid, they got raises, and Council pay was indexed to that of staff.) Headline-scanning Austinites saw this storyline beaten into hamburger over several days, but learned little about the rest of the $5 billion budget. We thought it was interesting enough to have written several thousand words about the budget in the last few weeks. But mainstream editors and producers assume readers and viewers will tune out anything with numbers, unless you make them angry about the numbers. And so they tried.

That may be a sad truth about Americans but it kinda sells Austinites short. And let's be honest: The precipitous decline in the Statesman's long-term outlook is not entirely unrelated to the fact that hundreds of thousands of people moved to Austin expecting it to have a well-informed, well-written, and influential daily newspaper, because Austin is a smart city that punches above its weight, and for many years they were sorely disappointed.

Another Side of the Story

One of the big factoids from the FY23 budget drop is that something like 1 in 6 of all city jobs is now vacant, after lockdowns and the Great Resignation and the retirement bulge that the city has been warning about for years. That applies to the city clerk as well, which announced it wouldn't be able to timely verify the 33,000 signatures submitted by Equity Action to get its Austin Police Oversight Act on the November ballot. (The clerk sampled 8,000 signatures to verify but only got through 4,000.) Advocates were disappointed, but neither they nor our reporters here were taken aback or felt misdeeds had been done. They're short-staffed! It checks out.

The daily, however, states unequivocally that Equity Action "failed to make a crucial deadline" to turn in its signatures, and was thus "disqualified" from the ballot, "stripping Austin voters of the chance" to weigh in. It does not provide any information to support throwing thick shade directly at "a group of police reform activists." Like, what was the deadline to turn in the signatures? The Statesman does not say. (Equity submitted the sigs on Aug. 8; this story appeared in the daily Aug. 22.) The daily is less fond of these activists, and more fond of their police union sparring partners, than are we. That doesn't excuse not getting basics right.

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