This has been a bad month for venerable Texas magazines. First CITE is cancelled, now The Texas Observer. While CITE has been around a pretty long time, The Texas Observer has been published for 68 years. It was founded in 1954. It is amazing that an unabashedly liberal magazine has survived in Texas for so long. It was founded by Ronnie Duggar, a left-wing journalist. In its existence, The Texas Observer published works by many excellent writers, and was famously edited by Molly Ivins from 1970 to 1976. The Texas Observer was owned by Duggar until 1994, when he transferred ownership to the Texas Democracy Foundation, which was established as a 501 (c) (3) to publish the Observer. They are the ones who suddenly shut the magazine down when it became clear that they didn’t have the money to continue publishing.
An article published yesterday by The Texas Tribune wrote:
The board of the nonprofit Texas Democracy Foundation, which owns the Observer, voted on Wednesday to approve the layoffs, according to the board members, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss its internal deliberations.
Robert R. Frump, who stepped down from the board in June to run the magazine’s business operations as a special adviser, resigned in protest on Thursday after he was informed of the decision. Following a last-ditch effort to slow the process and give employees more severance, the Observer’s board confirmed its decision on Sunday and plans to tell the staff on Monday morning that their last day will be this Friday, March 31, the board members said.
Frump resigned on the spot when told of the decision to shut down. He has a realistic view of the challenges facing a magazine like the Observer.
“Our reader base and our donor base is aging out,” Frump said. “There’s a nostalgia for Molly Ivins and Ann Richards and their era, and that’s a lot of what still drives the Observer. We weren’t able to build a bridge to the younger, progressive generation. I think the legacy is worth fighting for, but I do understand why the board feels the way it does.”
I had a subscription to the Observer many years ago, but let it lapse (because The Texas Observer was given away for free, so why pay for it?). I highly recommend Fifty Years of the Texas Observer, an anthology of short pieces from the magazine published in 2004.
This book is packed with news articles which most current day readers will likely find a bit obscure, but it effectively provides a history of Texas for the period between 1954 and 2004, as well as supplying a fantastic sampling of many of Texas’s best writers, including Bill Brammer, Willie Morris, Larry L. King, Molly Ivins, Gary Cartwright, Dave Hickey, Lars Eighner, J. Frank Dobie, John Henry Faulk, Larry McMurtry, Dagoberto Gilb, and many more.
Could The Texas Observer have survived if it had been run differently? That is not an easy question to answer, but I think so. If it had been run more as an online publication, updated continually, maybe. But The Texas Observer didn’t evolve with the times. It failed to connect with a younger generation of readers.
That said, one could see it revived in some form. After all, if San Antonio can create a new orchestra out of the ashes of its bankrupt symphony, reviving The Texas Observer seems doable. But it now will have to coexist with other nonprofit liberal publications, like The Texas Tribune, which broke this story.
Postscript, March 29, 2013: The Texas Tribune has just reported the following:
Three days after voting to cease publication and lay off its journalists, the nonprofit publisher of the Texas Observer said on Wednesday that it would change course and keep the 68-year-old liberal magazine going, following an emergency appeal that crowdsourced more than $300,000.
I thought something like this might happen, but certainly didn’t expect it to happen so quickly!
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