In the realm of Texas newspapers, one media mogul now rules them all—or close to it at least. Last February, Hearst Communications acquired the Austin American-Statesman. Seven months later, the privately held New York-based conglomerate bought up the Dallas Morning News, one of the country’s last locally owned metro papers, for just over $80 million—outbidding the notorious hedge-fund outfit Alden Global.
Considering the alternative, this was seemingly welcome news for the journalism business in Texas, where over 200 local papers have shuttered in the past 20 years. Under the vampiric regime of Gannett/Gatehouse, the Statesman was bled and hollowed out into a husk of a paper. And the Morning News had steadily slipped away from its glory days, when it had bureaus around the world, and was mired by turnover, layoffs, and declining print circulation.
Hearst, meanwhile, is one of the few media companies still investing in newspapers, and it has an established interest in Texas: It already owned the Houston Chronicle, these days the state’s best paper by a mile,and the San Antonio Express-News, as well as others in Laredo, Midland, and Beaumont. While Hearst’s spending spree has brought salvation in the short term, it does raise concerns about homogenization of coverage and about the fate of the union contracts that journalists have won in recent years at the Dallas and Austin papers. (A unionization effort was voted down in Hearst’s San Antonio newsroom in 2024.)
The Hearst expansion also raises questions long-term about the size, strength, and investigative firepower of the state’s press corps—particularly at the Capitol. Is it in fact a good thing that Hearst now runs the papers servicing the four largest metros in Texas, which are home to roughly two-thirds of the state population? Do these papers risk being stripped of their local identities and missions under Hearst assimilation? What will it look like for the journalists covering politics and state government at these papers to consolidate under a single Capitol bureau?
In an October interview, Hearst’s CEO Steve Swartz said the local papers would retain their independence but would also benefit from economies of scale—and more might in Austin. “I think that there are advantages to being concentrated in locales. … We will be able to better service in Texas a number of advertisers, to reach more people for them. I think we’re going to be able to have the biggest and most effective capital bureau in Austin, the best coverage of the statehouse and of the political leaders both in Texas and in Washington.”
But, one media exec cautioned to Texas Monthly after Hearst’s last acquisition: “I worry that you’re going to have a unipaper. You’re going to have newspapers that look the same, that are not local in the way we’ve come to understand local newspapers.”
Given the financial landscape of Texas media, it’s not hard to imagine Hearst expanding its reach even farther across the state—from the troubled Fort Worth Star-Telegram to the smaller papers inside the triangle in Waco, College Station, and Bryan, down to the Rio Grande Valley, up through the Panhandle, and over to El Paso.
The Hearst moves are yet another sign of the ongoing consolidation of the media industry in which the big get bigger and the small are often left dying on the vine. It’s also a symptom of the broken business of journalism—not just in newspapers but in television, radio, and online, both for-profit and nonprofit.
This isn’t all just inside baseball for navel-gazing journalists. It has direct ramifications for the quality and quantity of coverage of Texas politics and government—at a crucial time when politicians are increasingly indifferent to transparency and hostile to the media.
And it’s not just about print media. Consider the case of local TV news, where a significant share of people still turn for their information. The giant Nexstar Media (which is based in Irving, currently operates a dozen or so TV stations in the state, and enjoys a cozy relationship with the governor) is on course to buy TEGNA, one of its main competitors, in a massive $6.2-billion deal. That would significantly expand Nexstar’s footprint in Texas to include nearly 30 stations, eight being in overlapping territories. Most glaringly, if the merger goes through, Nexstar would control four of the six stations in the capital city.
That’s the sort of monopolistic control that typically sounds alarms at the Federal Communications Commission. However, Trump’s FCC is hurtling toward deregulation, cheered on by the Nexstars and Sinclairs of the world, with plans to remove market ownership restrictions. The CEO of Nexstar has personally praised Trump’s deregulatory push, saying it’s all about leveling the lopsided playing field to allow his little outfit to better compete with “the Big Tech and legacy Big Media companies that have unchecked reach and vast financial resources.”
And what might we expect from a new Nexstar-TEGNA combination—a stiffer spine in the face of fascistic coercion from the White House, by which Trump has successfully pressured various media corporations into bending the knee? Not likely. Even after Jimmy Kimmel returned from his temporary ouster (prodded by Trump’s FCC chairman) from national airwaves for a willfully misinterpreted comment about Charlie Kirk’s killing, Nexstar and Sinclair both announced they would continue to replace the show with local programming, saying the move was done to reflect the views and beliefs of local communities.
Sinclair, another of Nexstar’s main competitors, which has provided syndicated pro-Trump commentary for its local affiliates in the past, operates several TV stations in Texas and is seeking to expand its size as well. The virtue-signaling re: Kimmel won plaudits from the governor of Texas, who fawned: “Solid move. You are a private company with the independence to provide programming that is best for your audience and for your bottom line.”
The most prominent alternative to the pitfalls of for-profit media has become the nonprofit model, which depends on a mix of philanthropy and reader support. (The Observer, historically known for lacking profits, has been de jure nonprofit for three decades.)
Texas has been fortunate to be a hotbed for this model—led in recent years by The Texas Tribune, which has grown in size to rival the major newspapers. The Trib is now even expanding into the realm of hyperlocal news with new initiatives launching in Austin (a repurposing of the existing Austin Monitor) and Waco. There are also a host of successful local nonprofits in San Antonio, Fort Worth, and El Paso. These are all bolstered by ProPublica, the influential national investigative outlet that has set up shop in Texas and directed various collaborations with other newsrooms.
But, of course, there are plenty of problems here as well (something we at the Observer can attest to). The public radio stations of Texas are struggling to regain their footing after Republicans gutted federal funding. And there was one massive implosion in this sphere, when the highly touted Houston Landing, which launched three years ago with over $20 million in seed funding from major philanthropic interests in the Bayou City and nationally, went unceremoniously belly-up. What started as a promising new competitor with the Chronicle soon was plagued by tensions between management and staff until its board yanked the plug after having burned through all its cash.
A year into the second Trump presidency, and now heading into a midterm election season, these are dire times for the nation—the Fourth Estate included. In this season of authoritarian threats and open attacks on the First Amendment, ideally the free press would be in prime fighting shape. But getting bigger doesn’t always mean getting better.
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