Founded in 1954, The Texas Observer is a progressive nonprofit news outlet and print magazine covering the Lone Star State.

The Texas Observer strives to make Texas a more equitable place through investigative reporting, narrative storytelling, and political and cultural coverage and commentary. We dig beyond the headlines and contextualize news events. Our essays, reviews, and criticism seek to create a new cultural canon and challenge existing mythologies.

Since our founding in 1954, the Observer has focused on communities whose stories are too often ignored or poorly told. We seek not only to inform, but to empower our readers, as we work to hold public officials and corporations accountable. Our reporters recognize that oppressed people are experts on their own lives and trust their expertise.

Our journalism is fact-based and rigorous, and we prize writing that entertains as it informs. We value history as a reporting tool that allows us to interrogate the origins of policies and to correct narratives that whitewash exploitation, dispossession, and genocide.

Our founding mission statement continues to guide our work:

“We will serve no group or party but will hew hard to the truth as we find it and the right as we see it. We are dedicated to the whole truth, to human values above all interests, to the rights of humankind as the foundation of democracy. We will take orders from none but our own conscience, and never will we overlook or misrepresent the truth to serve the interests of the powerful or cater to the ignoble in the human spirit.”

(Header illustration by Adrià Voltà, depicting a cowboy on a horse in silhouette, riding into the sunset down the dry canyon where the Rio Grande once flowed. The tall stone walls are lined with prickly pears and other succulents.

1. Content Warnings/Wrappers: The Texas Observer is a news outlet, sharing information about politics from protests to policy-making. We endeavor to be friendly participants in the fediverse and we welcome polite feedback about our use of CW tags on our posts.
2. Users: This server is for staff of the Texas Observer, and is closed to registration from others.
3. Moving Accounts: Our staff are free to move their accounts to other Mastodon instances when they leave the Texas Observer, or at any other time.
4. DM's are Not Encrypted: Direct messages on Mastodon are not encrypted, and can be read by administrators on the instances of anyone mentioned. Do not use them for secure or truly private communications.
5. Alt Text: Users are expected to always add some form of descriptive alt text to pictures and other attached media.
6. We do not tolerate bigoted speech on this server (though we like to think our employees know better!). Targeted misgendering, deadnaming, or promotion of so-called "conversion therapy" is prohibited.

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