Texas Tribune CEO and Editor-in Chief Evan Smith walked from student to student and personally introduced himself to attendees waiting for the room to fill and for his presentation to begin on Thursday morning.
Journalism Professor Jake Batsell welcomed the words of a professional journalist yesterday as students and professors attended a guest lecture and learned from the experience and knowledge of Smith.
“The Texas Tribune is seen nationally as one of the most innovative and exciting things going on in journalism today,” said Batsell as he introduced Smith.
The Texas Tribune, as Smith explained, is a non-profit, non-partisan, public media organization that focuses on the topics of public policy, politics, and government in Texas. The Texas Tribune has 26 full-time employees and 13 reporters, representing one-third of the Capitol Press Corps.
Students from classes such as broadcast and digital journalism filled the crowd as Smith shared his experiences as a journalist, while giving students tips for success in the industry.
As a non-partisan organization, The Texas Tribune reports non-biased facts.
“We aren’t going to tell people what to think, but we are going to give people the tools to create their own thoughts,” Smith said.
Smith’s devotion and commitment to his online news site showed through both his passion for The Texas Tribune’s image and through the paper’s success. The Texas Tribune, according to Smith, now reaches a better audience than the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times in Texas.
As Smith noted, the magazine is the Wal-Mart of newspapers. Its goal is to offer any and everything a consumer could desire or need in one place to not only create an ease of information, but to also provide convenience for consumers.
“We want to be kind of your big box store. We want you to come to the Tribune as opposed to going to 30 other sites,” said Smith in his discussion of the importance of media aggregation.
Posting roughly 25 to 30 stories per week, and 20 to 30 blog posts per week, the Tribune believes it has found a balance of “how much it too much and how little is too little,” said Smith.
With the main purpose to the site to represent pure journalism to increase common knowledge of important issues, the Tribune incorporates everything from blogging, to polling, to audio and video aside from straight stories.
“The train that is the 21st century has left the station. I can’t understand why newspapers haven’t caught on to the power of social media,” Smith said. “It’s not website or social media or eemail alerts…it’s all,” he continued.
As Smith walked students through the arrangement of his site, he educated the audience with “Secrets of Success” and the challenges he faced in developing the Tribune. “You’ve got to be a great self promoter and great self-marketer in this world,” said Smith.
“When you know what you are, and you know what you’re not it makes what you’re doing a lot easier,” Smith said.
“The work that you’re doing at SMU is so close to professional,” he mentioned, “You are in school at the absolute best time to be going into this business, there’s never been a better time to be doing this. I think this program in particular is incredibly impressive.”
Smith’s closing left students with a better understanding of the industry and SMU senior E’Lyn Taylor felt privileged to have heard him speak.
“It kind of gives us a real life experience of what we will be doing in our careers and it shows us that the journalism department has different networks and connects that can help us further our career,” Taylor said.
