From Texas Public Radio:
The Texas Standard, the national daily news show of Texas went on the air 10 years ago on March 2, 2015. The first of its kind, statewide program brought together NPR stations from across Texas and a collaboration that highlights news from a Texas perspective.
And for all 10 of those years, Texas Standard host David Brown has been behind the microphone. He looked back on a decade of coverage with TPR’s Norma Martinez.
Martinez: Well, David, I’d like to maybe take you back to 11 years ago. What was the conversation happening before the Texas Standard came on the air? How was the idea brought up to bring this collaboration together?
Brown: I got to tell you, I can remember it very well. It doesn’t seem like 10 years ago. There were a couple of things happening. One was, well, as you know, as your listeners know, Texas is bigger than most countries, of course, and there was a long standing frustration that that whenever Texas was in the news, national news outlets would typically send in some reporter from New York or Washington to cover what was going on.
And since Texas was making a bigger and bigger mark on the national landscape, more people moving here and all that, it just made sense we should be hearing from journalists who live here and cover this place every day.
We have talked about growth — we have dedicated segments on business. We have beat reporters covering rural Texas. We have reporters covering the environment, Texans with disabilities, the arts.
That’s another thing that’s grown — we’re on virtually all of the public radio stations across Texas now. And early on, we had a handful of stations that were part of our partnership, and Texas Public Radio was one of the founding partners. So we had Houston Public Media, KERA up in North Texas, and of course, our home station, KUT in Austin.
So with that as a kind of basis, we started bringing in other partners, like the Texas Tribune, which is a nonprofit public media outlet, not on radio, but the reporters do first class work. The Texas Newsroom started to evolve out of that.
That’s a partnership of all of these stations bringing us the best in their reporting. And so, in terms of the coverage, I don’t think before Texas Standard existed, we had regular coverage of, say, the Texas State House. And if you’re down in San Antonio, you want to know what’s happening during a legislative session, but you don’t. No station has the resources to have someone there all the time. Now we do.
And so I think that there have been a lot of not just nuanced changes that I think the Standard has brought to the public media landscape. I think that it’s actually been rather pronounced. And we hear from legislators, for example, all the time, people who say, “Yeah, I listen to the Standard every day. It’s just part of my news diet.”
Martinez: Now I want to find out from you what some of your favorite stories that you remember airing on the Texas Standard in the last 10 years that were from San Antonio.
Brown: You know what? I remember … this was actually just a couple of days before we actually went on the air. In fact, this may have been part of our first show, because I know we wanted to make a splash with that first show, don’t you know.
I went down with Casey Cheek, our technical director, and some producers. We went down to the Alamo because we heard that Phil Collins, the musician, was going to be down there. I had no idea about this, but apparently he has, since he was a little kid, been an Alamo fan. I think he saw something on television about it and just fell into the rabbit hole. And all his life, had been collecting artifacts related to the history of Texas and the Alamo in particular.
So I caught up with him and he had this to say:
“For me, the collecting, you know, it’s not to amass something that is worth a lot of money, you know, I don’t intend to sell it on. I never did do, but it’s been great fun collecting it, and I will continue to collect, to add to it. But having it here, I mean, just doing this interview, in this sacristan. I mean, this is big deal for me. I grew up loving this place since I was five years old.”
Yeah, it was really cool. He was donating his collection of artifacts to the State of Texas on that day. And so it was really cool to be connected with not just Phil Collins, but that sort of historic donation.
And then there was another story that I know that our own Michael Marks collaborated with Texas Public Radio’s Joey Palacios. This was a story that actually won a national Edward R Murrow Award. Let’s hear a bit of that:
Palacios: San Antonio’s years long quest for an MLS team did not have a happy ending. NELSON WOLFF: I wouldn’t have a damn thing to do with MLS.
Palacios: That’s Judge Wolff again from an interview last week. The city and Bexar County both spent significant time and money to bring a team to town, but there’s no MLS team in San Antonio.
Marks: Instead, there’s one 80 miles up the road where pro soccer was never part of the public docket.
So Austin may have gotten the MLS team, but I think we both won with that major recognition in the national Murrow award. That’s just another way, I think, this partnership benefits everyone, not just folks in one particular area, but folks all over the state get to enjoy award winning reporting.
