When I lived in D.C., I measured my life in campaign cycles.
This 2024 presidential election year, life looks a little different. Now I work with a team of local San Antonio Report journalists who cover politics, business and related issues in the same community where they also live and vote.
True community journalism has skin in the game — these are our streets, our City Council chambers and our tax dollars, too.
Because of that dynamic, this election year, we’re trying something different: We’re asking our readers to engage with our local news coverage by signing up for text message alerts from the San Antonio Report.
In the coming months, we’ll be able to use this technology to send breaking news alerts, election guide resources and get your feedback on everything from our stories to our live events — which is a huge breakthrough for our ability to communicate with you directly.
We hope this is a way to deliver on our promise to create a more productive community experience around local news. Think of it like a conversation.
Reliable local news coverage in an election year has a direct effect on democracy. In fact, the San Antonio Report’s most recent audience survey revealed that 61% of respondents said our coverage helped them learn about elections.
In fact, 27% of our more than 900 respondents said they had voted in a local election because of our journalism — that’s 250 people who cast a ballot specifically due to the information they found in one of our stories.
That is impact.
Since civic engagement is such a central part of our mission, we’ll begin testing text message interaction by focusing on the November election. But there’s a mayoral race nipping at its heels, plus any number of local issues with immediacy that would be good avenues to explore, so your feedback will be essential. With texts, we want to inform and engage our community without adding another voice to the already overwhelming barrage of election year news that has led so many to tune out.
Having worked in national political journalism as well as San Antonio community news, I can tell you that local news has a different perspective than national news does. The red-vs.-blue issues that require voters to pick sides nationally are not the same issues we face in communities — where so many of our politicians and local political challenges are not partisan.
This year, when our nation feels most divided, I hope the San Antonio Report’s reliable local news coverage leads you to feel more informed, more empowered and even more engaged with this community.
Here’s how you can sign up for text messages and start texting us today:
