T-Squared

Late yesterday afternoon, Apple’s App Store kindly put our latest technological offering out to market: a brand new — and, naturally, free — iPad/iPhone app containing our news, blog posts, data applications and mutlimedia, our elected officials directory and our events listings.

Thanh Tan, a star in the PBS constellation, will join our staff on Monday, Feb. 7, stepping into the multiplatform reporter position that will be vacated in early February by Elise Hu.

Say it ain’t so: Elise Hu, one of the Trib’s best and brightest, is leaving us for NPR.

We’ve been waiting for it and wanting it for almost a year — and now the day has arrived. Finaliy, we’re launching a Trib-content-centric edition of the daily trivia game QRANK right here on our site.

It was a very interesting and newsworthy year for Texas politics and public policy, so it makes sense that traffic on our still-new-ish site would be robust — but even we optimists at Trib HQ didn’t imagine that it would be this robust.

There’s no way to put lipstick on this particular Oriole: We screwed up, plain and simple, in writing that you are “in heaven.”

Today marks the beginning of an effort to more openly and aggressively disclose when donors to The Texas Tribune are — for reasons entirely related to their place in the center of the news — the subjects of stories.

Mark Miller — most recently the editorial director of Newsweek and the editor of Newsweek Digital, and previously an assistant managing editor for Sunday and enterprise reporting at the Dallas Morning News — has agreed to join the Trib’s staff in mid-December in the newly created position of editor.

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.)