T-Squared

Tim Griggs and Jake Batsell will join the Trib team as Knight Foundation-funded investigators of best practices in the news business. What they learn and what we learn will hopefully benefit our fast-changing industry.

I’m a few days late reporting this — blame Wendy Davis — but the first six months of 2013 were extremely strong on all fronts for the Tribune.

For our new demography beat, we’ve hired one of our favorite and most feared colleagues from the Capitol press corps: former Austin American-Statesman reporter and current Reuters national correspondent Corrie MacLaggan.

We’re so pleased to introduce you to our latest hires: Jim Malewitz, who’ll be covering energy for us, and Neena Satija, our new reporter on the environment. Together they’ll step into Kate Galbraith’s hard-to-fill shoes.

Our coverage of this week’s historic events at the Lege was entirely in keeping with our mission. Your generous donations will help us carry that access, transparency and accountability forward.

This week we say goodbye to Kate Galbraith, our chief reporter on energy and the environment. For the last three years she made our audience smarter, and she made all of us around her smarter, too.

Good news, Trib fans: We’ve received a grant from the Ford Foundation that will enable us to dramatically expand our coverage of how precipitous demographic shifts are altering the public policy landscape in Texas.

The Tribune is thrilled to announce the 2013 Session Scramble, a Legislature-themed photo scavenger hunt. Think of it as Instagram but with cut-throat competition instead of sepia tone filters.

This is one of those weeks of the year when we make the case for modest support of our best efforts. It’s an easy sell, or should be. Thanks in advance for your generosity.

Ready to get your wonk on? Our three-day politics and public policy powwow is back and better than ever. Buy your tickets now, early birds, while they’re still cheep-cheep.