A six-year newsroom veteran, Audience Director Bobby Blanchard is now our chief audience officer and a member of the Tribune’s senior management team.
Sewell Chan
Sewell Chan was The Texas Tribune’s editor in chief from October 2021 to September 2024.
During his three-year tenure the Tribune won a National Magazine Award and a Collier Prize for State Government Accountability and was a Pulitzer finalist — all for the first time. It also won five national Edward R. Murrow Awards, two for overall excellence.
During Chan’s tenure the Tribune was acclaimed for its coverage of the Uvalde mass shooting, the impeachment trial of the Texas attorney general, numerous elections and campaigns, natural disasters, and debates over abortion, transgender rights, public education and more.
Chan recruited award-winning journalists and diversified the Tribune’s staff; built out its photo team; rebooted the Tribune’s premium politics newsletter, The Blast; and forged new partnerships with the Associated Press and FRONTLINE. He launched the Tribune's regional reporting initiative, providing coverage of areas of Texas that are severely underserved. He helped to manage the transition from the Tribune’s founding CEO, Evan Smith, to its second CEO, Sonal Shah, and to put the Tribune on a more sustainable footing and cultivate the next generation of leadership.
Chan left the Tribune in September 2024 to return to his hometown of New York City and serve as executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review.
Before joining the Tribune, Chan was previously a deputy managing editor and then the editorial page editor at the Los Angeles Times, where he oversaw coverage that was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 2021. Chan worked at the New York Times from 2004 to 2018, as a metro reporter, Washington correspondent, deputy Op-Ed editor and international news editor. He began his career as a local reporter at the Washington Post in 2000.
Posted in
T-Squared
T-Squared: Matthew Choi is The Texas Tribune’s new Washington correspondent
A former Tribune reporting fellow, Choi previously worked at Politico, where he covered energy and climate and wrote a daily energy newsletter.
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Migrant Tragedy in San Antonio
Archbishop of San Antonio warns of “a culture of death”
In an interview with The Texas Tribune, the Roman Catholic prelate cited the school shooting in Uvalde, an intensified narcotics trade and the deaths of 53 migrants in a tractor-trailer in San Antonio. He urged comprehensive immigration reform.
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T-Squared
T-Squared: Pooja Salhotra will cover East Texas for The Texas Tribune
Pooja has worked at Chalkbeat, CNN and NPR. Based in Lufkin, she will report from a vast and diverse region that borders on three states.
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Economy
Since 2005, Texas has lost more newspaper journalists per capita than all but two other states
Of Texas’ 254 counties, 27 no longer have a newspaper. Loss of local news coverage has been associated with higher levels of mistrust, misinformation and malfeasance. Only California and New Jersey have lost more newspaper journalists, relative to population.
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Uvalde school shooting
U.S. Senate, in 64-34 vote, advances bipartisan gun legislation backed by Cornyn
The legislation would enhance background checks for gun purchasers younger than 21. It would also make it easier to remove guns from people threatening to kill themselves or others, as well as people who have committed domestic violence.
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Politics
Texas Republican Convention calls Biden win illegitimate and rebukes Cornyn over gun talks
Some 5,100 delegates and alternates voted on a party platform that also calls for ending the federal income tax, requiring education about fetal gestation and limiting the Legislature’s right to regulate guns.
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T-Squared
T-Squared: Meet The Texas Tribune’s new regional editor, Nic Garcia
Joining us from The Des Moines Register, Nic will oversee reporters based in Lubbock, Lufkin and elsewhere. They’ll cover the impact of state policies across Texas’ diverse communities.
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T-Squared
T-Squared: Meet our Poynter-Koch Media and Journalism fellows for 2022-23
The yearlong fellowship will support work by photojournalist Evan L’Roy and breaking news reporters William Melhado and Reese Oxner.
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Uvalde school shooting
Protesters across U.S. and Texas join March for Our Lives rallies against gun violence
Outside the Capitol in Austin, relatives of Jackie Cazares, 9, and Annabell Guadalupe Rodriguez, 10, two of the 19 students killed at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, tearfully addressed a crowd.
