Media

Austin’s long and rich media history goes as far back as the Capitol City itself. The Austin City Gazette, a 4-page weekly, made its debut on October 30, 1839, the same year that Austin became the capital of the Republic of Texas. Published by Samuel Whiting, a journalist from Houston, the City Gazette carried local, national, and foreign news; letters to the editor; editorials; and an occasional work of fiction. By the time the City Gazette folded in 1842 (some say due to the threat of invasion from Mexico), the frontier town of Austin had other publications to take its place. Austinites, it seemed, were eager for news, although getting it to this remote outpost was never easy—and definitely not quick. During the Civil War, one local publisher debuted his one-page bulletin, the Texas Almanac Extra, which he rushed into print 3 times a week after waiting for Pony Express riders to hustle in with the latest editions of the Houston and Galveston newspapers.

Decades later, during the Depression of the 1930s, the dean of American television journalism, Walter Cronkite, got his start in Austin. “My first appearance before a microphone was during the college years at Austin,” he writes in his book, A Reporter’s Life. Cronkite admits that his daily sports report on Austin radio station KNOW consisted of scores he memorized from a Western Union sports ticker at a Sixth Street tobacco shop while pretending to read the newspaper. “Once out of sight of the smoke shop, I ran at breakneck speed back to the studio and typed out my daily sports intelligence before it fled my memory,” Cronkite said. He then moved on to work in print journalism in Austin, covering Texas politics. “It was a vast and diverse state, and the fight for dominance and privilege in Austin was never ending,” wrote Cronkite.

The Austin media landscape has changed a mite since Cronkite’s days here. Today’s residents are bombarded with choices over what publications to read, where to land on the radio dial for programming that serves their needs, and which television news program to select. Austin also has about as eclectic a selection of local social media websites and online periodicals as one is likely to find in any city this size. Without a doubt, one of the pleasures of living in Austin, one of the qualities that define this city, is the abundance and diversity of reading material out there. It’s not all award-winning stuff, but much of it is—and some of it deserves to be.