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 publication going, following an emergency appeal that crowdsourced close to $300,000 to save the 68-year-old liberal publication.
“Today, upon receiving significant financial pledges over the past few days, the Texas Observer board gathered to vote to reconsider previous board actions,” Laura Hernandez Holmes, the president of the board of the Texas Democracy Foundation, which publishes the magazine, said in a statement. “The vote to rescind layoffs was unanimous, and the board is eager to move the publication to its next phase.”
She praised the donors who had stepped forward “as well as gratitude to the Observer’s staff for stepping up and working hard to keep the publication alive.”
The Observer still faces significant obstacles to its survival, however. Its top business officer resigned on Thursday, and its chief fundraiser stepped down Monday, both in protest of the board’s decision to close the magazine. The fundraiser, James Canup, started the GoFundMe appeal hours after resigning.
Hernandez Holmes announced that she is stepping down from the board on Friday, though she will remain a donor.
“The long-standing issues at the Observer, regardless of the personalities who fill the org chart, are structural,” Canup said in an interview before the board reversed its decision. “The board of the Texas Observer has always been informal in its operations. It’s easy for a sense of distrust to develop between the board and the staff, and similarly between the small business and editorial sides of the publication.”
Among the reforms needed, he said, are a CEO to oversee both the business and editorial teams; changes in bylaws that would improve governance and accountability at the board level; and new board members with experience in media, technology and business. The board has been “consumed by day-to-day operational considerations over the last couple of years and, reasonably, haven’t had the opportunity to pull their heads up, long into the distance, and think strategically,” Canup said.
Canup said he was elated at the strong response to the fundraising appeal but ruled out rejoining the staff. “If the journalism of the Texas Observer is a delicious meal, I think I want to eat the meal, not be in the kitchen,” he said.
The Observer has always been scrappy, even in good times. This was not the first time the magazine had faced a near-death experience, although it was perhaps the most visible, attracting attention in The Nation and The New York Times after The Texas Tribune first broke the news of the decision to close on Sunday night.
Robert R. Frump, a longtime board member who joined the staff of the Observer last summer to temporarily oversee business operations, and who resigned in protest on Thursday, said the Observer has always been a dicey economic proposition.
“I know it seems improbable, but it has been improbable since 1954,” he said.
Monika Bauerlein, the CEO of Mother Jones, the San Francisco-based liberal magazine, said the issues at the Observer resonated since both publications “were born into the same family of scrappy muck-raking magazines.” Such magazines, she said, “can do rigorous journalism and be openly committed to core values of justice and democracy.”
She added: “That kind of unapologetically engaged journalism is difficult to sustain financially at the best of times, and it’s getting more so at a time when wealth is getting more and more concentrated, and those people and corporations in whose hands it is concentrated are the same people and corporations at which a magazine like the Texas Observer takes aim.”