T-Squared: Yours and Yours Alone

Today is the first day of our fall membership drive. It's not the first time we've asked for your money — heh — and it won't be the last. But as always, we're asking for a reason. There are many great and important causes out there to support, and even the wealthiest among us have finite dollars to give away each year. But our crusade for smarter Texans and a better Texas is worth joining. Here's why.

This state we love is the epicenter of so many important battles being waged: over school finance, demographic inevitability, social infrastructure investment, road funding, women's health, the plight of the uninsured, workforce development, and on and on. What happens here affects the rest of the country disproportionately because Texas is so large and influential; what happens elsewhere, particularly in D.C., affects us disproportionately for the same reason.

So it's important to pay attention. To pay attention, you have to know there's something to pay attention to. To know, you have to be told. To be told, someone has to tell you.

We tell you — every day, every week, every month. We've been telling you for more than four years now, and we intend to tell you for years to come, via robust, ambitious, entrepreneurial, fair, thorough and accurate reporting. Your support, through membership in the Tribune, and that of your neighbors and fellow citizens, makes it possible.

There has never been a better time to become a member. With the 2014 elections, the 2015 legislative session and the 2016 presidential race just over the rise, Texas needs an honest broker — someone to explain behavior, interpret consequences, analyze trends and predict what comes next, all in a fact-based, nonpartisan fashion. That someone is actually 20-odd someones: the Trib reporters and editors and technologists and artists who toil all day long to produce the finest journalism in the state.

And all of it's for you. As a nonprofit with an unwavering public service mission, we're beholden to no one but the 26.5 million residents of Texas. You own us, in a manner of speaking; we're yours and yours alone. It's a great honor to get up every day and do what we absolutely consider to be the people's business. This is the work of our lives.

Won't you help us keep doing it? Join today.