New site in TX, "The Texas Tribune" is very cool. Could be future local news model:

[beachmom]

http://www.texastribune.org/

Here is a brief summary of what it is about:

http://gawker.com/5395993/heaven-and-hell-in-journalism-jobs

THE BEST: The Texas Tribune just launched. It's a nonprofit Texas journalism dealie led by perpetual Ellie winner editor Evan Smith, and funded by millions of dollars from public-minded rich Texas dudes, as well as public donations. Paid Content reports:

it can be a little hard for those of us who came out of a post-1999 start-up environment to grasp the salaries being paid by the Tribune out of the gate: Smith's $315,000, three others at six figures. The reporters make competitive wages-up to $90,000.

All you J-school kids flocking to NYC, pack up and move to Texas immediately! Quick! It gets no better than that.

I just took a look, and it is excellent. Frankly, I want a start up like this in my state. The fact that the reporters earn a very good salary means they are going to snag excellent reporters.

[beachmom]

1. Oh, and this is VERY COOL. They are providing databases:

http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=101&aid=172892

The site features 11 databases -- which contain information about federal campaign donations, gubernatorial appointees and government employee salaries -- and plans to create several more, according to Smith.

The goal is to make the databases interact with one another so that readers can see how the information in the databases is related, said Texas Tribune reporter Matt Stiles.

...

The Texas Tribune, which wants to share these databases with whatever news organizations, bloggers or citizen journalists want them, is planning to create embeddable widgets of some databases and eventually make information from the databases available on its iPhone application.

VERY cool. The exact opposite of the arrogant newspaper dinosaurs who still think they can charge for general news.