John Thornton, a financier who leveraged his wealth and affect to embark at the apparently quixotic project of reviving native journalism in a time of disaster, through founding The Texas Tribune, a seminal regional nonprofit information group, and the American Journalism Mission, which helps native electronic newsrooms across the nation, died on Saturday in Austin, Texas. He was once 59.
His dying, through suicide, adopted a protracted psychological well being battle, a spokesman for the American Journalism Mission stated.
Mr. Thornton helped exchange the monetary style for sustainable native journalism when, in 2009, he based The Texas Tribune, a member-supported, digital-only, nonpartisan media group. The Tribune, which started with 11 journalists and editors focusing in large part on Texas state politics, now has a newsroom of greater than 50 personnel contributors masking native problems in all 254 counties within the state, along with a congressional reporter in Washington.
That good fortune impressed Mr. Thornton to take a look at to copy the style national with the American Journalism Project, a “challenge philanthropy” effort, as he termed it, primarily based in Washington. He began it in 2019 with Elizabeth Green, a founding father of Chalkbeat, a nonprofit schooling information group.
Each The Tribune and the journalism venture aimed to fill the gaps created through the decline or disappearance of native legacy information organizations in an technology when extra American citizens had been turning to far-flung corners of the web and social media for information — or one thing such as it. That decline had depleted the ranks of journalists who may have differently ferreted out native corruption and tracked the billions spent through town and state governments.
Mr. Thornton’s concept was once to faucet huge philanthropies, rich donors and grass-roots supporters to create nonprofit electronic information retailers “that might play the position of the American newspaper, however be funded as civic establishments, just like the ballet,” Sarabeth Berman, the manager government of the American Journalism Project, stated in an interview.
With give a boost to from socially minded teams like Emerson Collective, based through Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs, and Arnold Ventures, headquartered in Houston, the venture has raised greater than $225 million to lend a hand fund 50 native electronic nonprofit information retailers in 36 states, in addition to offering strategic help.
The primary 22 newsrooms that had been funded have, on moderate, doubled in measurement since receiving their grants and created jobs for greater than 200 journalists, consistent with the group.
“It’s now not an exaggeration to mention John Thornton modified American journalism — and stored it,” Evan Smith, a co-founder of The Tribune, stated in a observation. “No person made him do that. He believed in status up and supporting, along with his money and time, the correct of reports organizations across the nation as a result of he knew the effects of the huge want going unmet.”
Even so, Mr. Thornton — as a best government of Austin Ventures, the place he helped oversee greater than $4 billion in property below control — didn’t start his foray into journalism as a crusader for fact.
“In my day task, I’m a challenge capitalist, so like a lot else in my lifestyles, this one was once born out of a quest for financial gain,” he wrote in The Tribune in 2009, recounting its authentic project. “In 2007, it struck my companions and me that the secure decline of the once-nearly-$60-billion American newspaper business must provide some monetary alternatives for corporations like ours.”
He and his Austin Ventures staff concluded that native newspapers seemed like a deadly funding. However the perils to the American political gadget perceived to them even better if their project went unfulfilled. “The economic press,” he added, “is simply too fragile for our democracy to depend on for the entire information and knowledge that we require to serve as as accountable electorate.”
John Douglas Thornton was once born on April 9, 1965, in Wichita, Kan. Upon getting his degree from Wichita Northwest Prime Faculty in 1983, he earned a bachelor’s stage in economics from Trinity College in San Antonio, graduating first in his elegance in 1987.
He labored for McKinsey & Corporate sooner than heading to Stanford College, the place he gained a Grasp of Trade Management stage in 1991. Then he joined Austin Ventures, the place he guided almost 50 device investments.
The Austin Ventures staff “in no time decided that there needed to be more uncomplicated techniques to make cash” than making an investment in journalism, Mr. Thornton recalled. In a 2010 interview with The Columbia Journalism Overview, he described a “stultifying” assembly by which tips for saving newspapers incorporated publishing extra pictures of pets.
“I believed, ‘It’s been two hours and journalism hasn’t been discussed,’” he stated. “That’s when the sunshine went on for me, that perhaps public-service journalism” is a “public just right similar to nationwide protection, blank air, blank water.”
Armed with little greater than a fuzzy thought, he persuaded Mr. Smith, the previous editor of the award-winning mag Texas Per thirty days, to be The Texas Tribune’s editor in leader and president, and Ross Ramsey, a distinguished reporter and editor in Texas, to be government editor.
“We didn’t have a marketing strategy,” Mr. Smith stated in an interview. “We didn’t have any analysis that we had completed at the feasibility of this. We didn’t do any center of attention teams. What we had was once a work of brown butcher paper from a fish fry eating place on which we had scribbled notes about what we needed this factor to be.”
As The Tribune’s first chairman, Mr. Thornton equipped an preliminary $1 million in seed capital and some other $1 million the following yr. By means of the tip of 2009, The Tribune had attracted about $4 million in investment, together with $500,000 from Houston Endowment, $250,000 from Knight Foundation and $2,500 each and every from greater than 60 company sponsors.
It became out to be cash neatly spent. Over time, The Tribune has gained Peabody and Edward R. Murrow awards, amongst many others, and ultimate yr was once a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for its investigation, in partnership with ProPublica and the PBS program “Frontline,” into the police reaction to the 2022 mass taking pictures at Robb Fundamental Faculty in Uvalde, Texas.
The Tribune has been credited as an inspiration for identical retailers all over the rustic, together with CalMatters in California, The Nevada Independent and the Pulitzer-winning Mississippi Today.
By the point Mr. Thornton stepped down from The Tribune board in 2022, the group had raised about $120 million from people, foundations and companies. “I might describe that as a trick worthy of Houdini,” stated Mr. Smith, who additionally stepped down round that point.
Mr. Thornton is survived through his spouse, Erin Thornton, whom he married in 2019, and his stepsons, Wyatt and Wade Driscoll. His marriage to Julie Blakeslee resulted in divorce in 2010.
Mr. Thornton’s finance occupation persisted whilst he remained concerned with journalism. In 2016, he and Chris Pacitti, an established Austin Ventures spouse, based Elsewhere Partners, a company that invests in bootstrapped device corporations.
However the want to to find new techniques to talk fact to energy remained entrance of thoughts. Lately, Mr. Thornton noticed his groundbreaking information style as extra the most important than ever, given the continued woes of native and regional newspapers and internet sites.
“My native paper got here available on the market 18 months in the past or so, and I had rich, in reality civically big-hearted pals who stated, ‘Smartly, what do you suppose?’” Mr. Thornton stated in a 2020 interview with Vox. “And my reaction was once, ‘Smartly, what are they going to pay you to take it?’”
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