This story has been updated.
A partnership several years in the making became official on Wednesday with two local major news outlets, Texas Public Radio and the San Antonio Report, combining to form one operation.
Announced in May following approval by the board of directors of both organizations, the move to share resources and capabilities and improve efficiencies launched July 1.
The partnership is a reflection of a new media reality in local journalism, said Joyce MacDonald, president and CEO of Greater Public, a professional development association for public media.
“The combination of the two organizations is like a multiplier effect,” MacDonald said. “You’re both doing great stuff. If you’re sort of arm-in-arm doing that together, I think it would be much more efficient and much more effective.”
Texas Public Radio (TPR) is an independent, nonprofit media organization, organized in 1988, that serves San Antonio and communities throughout South and Central Texas.
On the airwaves, TPR is broadcast at the NPR member station KSTX (San Antonio), the classical music station KPAC (San Antonio), and several regional stations.
Longtime journalist Ashley Alvarado is president and CEO of TPR which has a staff of 45 team members, with one new hire coming and two positions open.
The San Antonio Report is a nonprofit, digital news outlet founded as the Rivard Report by former newspaper executive editor Robert Rivard and author Monika Maeckle in 2012 as a free, digital publication covering local news.
In 2020, the board approved a name change to the San Antonio Report and named local nonprofit leader Angie Mock publisher and CEO as Rivard transitioned toward retirement in 2022.
Leigh Munsil, a former CNN Politics editor, has served as San Antonio Report’s editor in chief since 2021.
Today, the staff includes eight reporters, a staff photojournalist and three editors covering local news and topics ranging from politics, business and education to health, public safety and the food scene, and two business managers.
The Report’s managing editor, Laura Garcia, came from The Texas Tribune in 2024.
A Report For America journalist covering the veterans and military beat joins the team later this month.
In addition to daily news and features, the Report also produces for readers several daily and weekly newsletters and hosts a variety of annual community events, including CityFest and the upcoming A View from the C-Suite.
On Wednesday, a charitable contribution agreement, agreed to by both organizations’ boards on May 11, went into effect. The Report as an organization has donated its assets to TPR, officially bringing together the two nonprofit media outlets.
In anticipation of the partnership, the organizations launched a combined fundraising effort, securing $1.4 million in local contributions from several sources and bringing the annual combined operating budget to over $10 million.
“If we needed any further confirmation that this was the right decision, at the end of the day, the response from our local funding community, which has been amazing, really reinforces the fact that we are on the right path together,” said Alan Kramer, chairman of the TPR board of directors, at an employee meet-and-greet Thursday. “Their enthusiasm and immediate support affirm that this vision that we have been thinking about as a ’what if’ statement for many years needed to occur.”
“We are already talking to national funders,” said Mock, who is moving from CEO into a transformational gifts role for one year. “And what we’re finding is that there’s a great interest in learning more about what it is we’re doing here in San Antonio to strengthen local news.”
Growing capacity
The partnership comes at a time when Texas ranks 47th nationwide for the density of journalists based on population, according to a recent report by MuckRack and Rebuild Local News. The index shows Bexar County has five journalists for every 100,000 residents.
A study by the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, found that about 3,500 newspapers in the U.S. have closed since 2005, with Texas losing 45% of its newspapers despite rapid population growth. Worldwide, thousands of journalists have been let go.
In January, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting voted to dissolve after Congress rescinded federal funding for NPR and PBS, putting the nation’s “news deserts” at further risk of losing access to news coverage.
“To actually get to be part of an exciting story, to get to be part of a conversation on growth, both in the organization growing, but also the capacity growing in a time where there’s so much that’s hard to process … it is exciting, and it’s renewing and refueling for me,” Alvarado said.
Before joining TPR in late 2024, Alvarado was vice president of community engagement and strategic initiatives at Southern California Public Radio, which now broadcasts as “LAist,” and participated in that acquisition effort.
“In this case, you actually have two organizations that have both had success digitally,” Alvarado said. “By combining resources we can further engage people online and across platforms, and find more ways to showcase San Antonio Report journalism, too.”
Mock said the timing was just right for the Report to take it to another level.
“Historically we’ve had really solid growth that’s been mostly organic,” she said. “When a nonprofit news organization hits that 13- or 14-year mark, it takes a lot more to grow your audience, and you need things like dedicated marketing dollars, you need more people you know that do more things that help a mature organization find new audiences.”
Integrating newsrooms
The 15-member San Antonio Report staff became TPR employees on July 1.
Later this month, they will move from the Report’s offices at 711 Travis St. to join the staff at TPR headquarters in the Irma and Emilio Nicolas Media Center at 321 W. Commerce St.
For now, the two newsrooms will continue to publish news and feature stories on their individual online sites while also sharing content across platforms. A plan to integrate the two will be developed in the coming years.
Munsil will serve as senior vice president for news and editor in chief, leading the full spectrum of TPR and San Antonio Report offerings.
“We’re not in a hurry to make any specific strategic decisions, we’ll do a lot of thinking through opportunity areas,” Munsil said. “We want to continue to be the San Antonio Report for the purposes of our audience because they love what we do. Same with Texas Public Radio.”
Both newsrooms have a great product, even if their reach isn’t as broad as it could be, she added, and the consolidation will help close that gap.
“We need to be more proactive with newsletters,” Munsil said. “Our social [media] presence needs to really reflect all the work that gets done on the site. I think there’s just a lot of ways that we can better connect to San Antonians where they are.”
The Report has about 1,800 contributing members, and TPR has 13,722.
TPR’s newsroom is led by Vice President of News Dan Katz and Managing Editor Yvette Benavides.
Katz said combining the two media outlets will create the largest nonprofit newsroom San Antonio has ever seen, with a newsroom staff of more than 30 reporters.
“TPR and the San Antonio Report have punched above their respective weights for a long time,” Katz said. “I think TPR has been ready for its next chapter — to move beyond being a scrappy newsroom to truly become the premier news source for San Antonio and South Texas, and this combination is going to put us in a great position to be able to do that.”
About 10 years ago, the public began turning to public media organizations like TPR as a primary news source, including breaking news and daily updates. That made it challenging for an outlet like TPR to stay true to its identity, he said, producing long-form content and features while also keeping up with the pressures of the daily and hourly news cycle.
The expanded newsroom will allow TPR to be ”properly resourced to take on this challenge,” Katz said.
‘Same goal under one roof’
Andrea Drusch, senior government and politics reporter at the San Antonio Report since 2022, called it a “dream team of journalists” who share the same goals of serving the community working under one roof.
”It’s exciting to think about what we can accomplish together, particularly headed into a big election this fall, where Bexar County and South Texas have such a major role to play in the broader landscape,” Drusch said.
“We’ve taken on so many new projects to expand our reach beyond a digital news site — from launching new newsletters, to a major uptick in live journalism and candidates debates.”
While those things have become popular with readers, the staff hadn’t grown to keep up, “and we’d sort of hit a wall in terms of what more we could take on.”
Nathan Cone, vice president of programming, is the longest-tenured employee at TPR, having started working on its classical music station KPAC in 1995, then later KSTX.
In that time, he’s witnessed TPR evolve and expand, adding signals to its profile, being named Texas Public Radio and hosting events like Cinema Tuesdays.
Cone also called the partnership a “force multiplier.”
“What it comes down to for me is that I love the work itself, and I love doing the work of radio and communicating with our audience and I really feel like we’re doing a good service of educating, enlightening and entertaining people in South Texas,” he said.
Local news for San Antonio
TPR Senior Reporter David Martin Davies started TPR’s newsroom at a time when it was still not clear that a public radio station needed to cover local news in addition to the national news via NPR.
“There actually was a raging debate about why do this — if people want local news, they can go get it someplace else,” said Davies, who started his TPR career as a freelancer 25 years ago and now hosts “The Source” daily and “Texas Matters” shows.
“I was arguing that we needed not just local news, but local news that served our specific slice of the community,” he said. “Not only are we going to tell San Antonio stories but we’re going to tell San Antonio stories to the nations of the world.”
So he’s “joyful” about what the partnership with the Report brings to TPR and San Antonio. “This is going to be complete news without a paywall, which I really love, to the entirety of our community.”
Ken Rodriguez is a senior features writer for the Report and also unit council chairman of the San Antonio Report Union. The San Antonio Report unionized under the Media Guild of the West in 2024 and signed a contract in 2025.
TPR has voluntarily recognized the union. Though the union’s contract expired June 30, this week Rodriguez said the union signed a memorandum of understanding that adds some of the union’s contract tenets to the original TPR employment offers, in anticipation of a new contract to be negotiated in the coming weeks.
Texas Public Radio also unionized in 2024 but is still in the process of negotiating a contract.
Consolidation trend
Informal talks between TPR and the Report over combining forces go back at least eight years, Rivard said. His view is that it’s a financially smart move to make in the current nonprofit media landscape.
“I’m all for it, because I think consolidation in general is a trend that we’re going to see all across the nonprofit world, and I think we’re definitely going to see it in media, because it’s hard to raise money for media,” versus causes that support children or basic needs in a struggling economy, he said.
The number of nonprofit news organizations in the U.S. has grown substantially in the last decade or so, and in recent years, some have joined forces as funding dwindled and business models were reshaped.
In addition to the LAist acquisition, the member-supported Denverite combined with Colorado Public Radio in 2019 when CPR acquired the online news site from parent company, Spirited Media.
Also in 2019, the Philadelphia-based Billy Penn, another member-supported online publication founded in 2014, joined WHYY, the region’s NPR and PBS public media affiliate.
Now San Antonio is following suit.
The partnership already represents a win for local journalism, said Public Media’s Joyce MacDonald.
“When you look across the landscape, all organizations that are involved in doing fact-based reporting and who are independently owned and who really care about their communities, you’re all on the same side,” she said.
“You have shared values, you have shared goals, and why not reach for those goals in partnership rather than in a fragmented way?”
Clarification: This story has been updated to clarify Alvarado’s role with the LAist acquisition.