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Evan Smith

Evan Smith’s staff photo

Evan Smith is a co-founder and senior adviser at The Texas Tribune, where he served as CEO from 2009 to 2022. He’s also a senior adviser at Emerson Collective, where he works closely with the leadership teams of nonprofit news organizations around the country. Previously he spent nearly 18 years at Texas Monthly, stepping down in August 2009 as the magazine’s president and editor in chief. Evan is also the host of “Overheard with Evan Smith,” a weekly half-hour interview program that airs on PBS stations around the country. A native of New York, he is a graduate of Hamilton College and Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

Past Contributions

  • Ads Infinitum: A Message to All Our Campaign Consultant Pals

    By Evan Smith

    This blog is designed to be a repository for your best work: the ads you create for your clients in legislative, congressional, and statewide races. We'd love it if you'd send us audio, video, campaign mailers, and the like that we can post here for the next year—and you can be sure we'll be asking the same of your counterparts at rival campaigns. Full Story 

  • T-Squared: Day One

    By Evan Smith

    For those of us who willingly quit good jobs with big media companies to join an untried journalism start-up with an untested business model, this site, this thing, is the expression of our ideals, the realization of our dreams, and the validation of our faith. We're enormously proud, every one of us, of what we're doing and why. We're awed and cowed by what we've been able to produce so quickly and on a relative shoestring (relative, that is, compared to the budgets we lived within and among just a few months ago). And we've barely gotten started. Full Story 

  • Welcome to The Texas Tribune

    By Evan Smith

    What we intend to accomplish with the Trib — what we mean to do on an ongoing basis — is right there in our stated mission: to promote civic engagement and discourse on public policy, politics, government, and other matters of statewide concern. Full Story 

  • A conversation with Dan Bartlett

    By Evan Smith

    Former White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett sits down with the Tribune's Evan Smith to talk about Rick vs. Kay, what Texans should think about health care reform and troop levels in Afghanistan, and the GOP's missed opportunity to reach out to Hispanics. Full Story 

  • We're mobile! We're on iTunes!

    By Evan Smith

    Because we believe so strongly in distributing our content across as many platforms as possible, we're happy to report that you can take the Trib with you. You can see a constantly updated stream of our top stories on our mobile site, m.texastribune.org, and you can download our podcasts and our free Elected Officials Directory app on iTunes (there's a free version and a paid version). If there's another way you'd like to get access to Trib content other than at your computer, let us know. Full Story 

    The Texas Tribune iPhone app.
    Credit: Todd Wiseman