Enlarge

You may be wondering what happened to The Texas Tribune on Election Night. *You're* what happened: We had a truly unprecedented (for us) surge of traffic that crashed our servers.

Yep, we turned 1 today. (It's not too late to send a card.)

At last night's Online Journalism Awards, presented as part of the annual Online News Association conference, The Texas Tribune was one of six sites to win the prestigious General Excellence award.

Today is the first day you'll see robust journalism produced by the reporters of The Texas Tribune in the pages of The New York Times and on nytimes.com.

On Tuesday, Nov. 2 — which happens to be Election Day — The Texas Tribune will have been live and online for a year. Hell of a good time for a party, yes?

Now it can be told — more deliberately and more fully fleshed out than you may have read yesterday: The Trib has indeed inked a partnership with the New York Times that will result in the best of our content appearing in the pages of the most iconic newspaper in the world.

I'm pleased to report that next Friday, Oct. 15, the Trib — in partnership with Austin public radio station KUT and Austin public televison station KLRU — will present separate hour-long interviews with Democrat Bill White and Republican Rick Perry. The interviews will take place at KLRU's Austin City Limits studio before a live audience.

Coming this Sunday: the latest collaboration between the Trib and one of the state's venerable newspapers.

Six weeks and counting: November 3, 2010, is the day when we reset the Trib membership clock to zero, when anyone who's been with us for a year or more needs to stand with us again to remain an active member. There are a bunch of good reasons to re-up.

Last week, the Trib presented the Texas premiere of My Trip to Al-Qaeda, a new documentary that aired on HBO tonight. After the screening, I interviewed the filmmakers, director Alex Gibney and author and journalist (and Austinite) Lawrence Wright.

NPR's Weekend Edition shows the Trib a little love. Will you?

Our remarkable crop of summer interns — optimistic and high-spirited at a low moment for our business — are the future of this thing we do. Their schools should be proud of what they accomplished over the last two months. They themselves should be. We certainly are.

Monthly uniques and page views are much higher than we projected; more of our visitors are from outside Austin than we ever could have hoped; and our search engine optimization strategy is paying off: All is better-than-well here at the Trib.

Today we're publishing the first of three stories in a series that is the result of a partnership between the El Paso Times and the Trib — a show of the "hang together" spirit bolstering public service journalism in the 21st century.

Effective immediately, inspired by ProPublica, we've added a "republish" button on most of our pages.