For a nonpartisan newsroom covering politics, the toughest part of a creator partnership came before any outreach: deciding which creators it could work with without putting its credibility at risk.
The Texas Tribune came in with several ideas for building brand awareness and highlighting events or environmental reporting through creators, spanning nature, politics, and lifestyle. Those ideas included working with a creator who highlights food businesses and unique spots in Texas to talk about the Tribune's mission and work; working with nature or sustainability creators to promote planned events and environmental reporting; working with a Texas young-adult creator to show how people get involved in their community; and working with a national political creator to connect with similar creators in Texas around what it is like to be a politics creator.
Initially, the strongest idea was to work with an Austin-based creator on a mission to visit all of Texas's state parks in 2026, to promote and cover a planned event about the state's newest park, Palo Pinto. The event would have taken place at the park and included a walk-through, but the state parks agency cancelled it several times, so the team never approached the creator.
Adriana Lacy
Since then, the strongest idea has been to work with Austin or Texas-based creators to promote the annual Texas Tribune Festival, which takes place in late September. The team is still identifying exactly which creators, and has had many discussions about who would be appropriate. It wrestled, for example, with whether to work with overtly political creators and how that could affect its perception as a nonpartisan news nonprofit that covers Texas politics and policy. The team considered leaning into politics and featuring political creators as festival attendees, or going behind the scenes of what it is like to be a political creator in Texas. In the end, it came to believe it may be best to work with more lifestyle-focused creators who can help reach new audiences that are not inherently interested in politics and who may be seen as more neutral.
The newsroom has not yet actively collaborated with a creator and is still selecting potential collaborators. But the process clarified a shared concern: whether a creator promoting the Tribune's reporting could do so accurately and fairly without either party taking a hit to its public perception, whether that is a creator being called out for not taking a stance, or the Tribune being called out for collaborating with an overtly political creator.
The program also spurred other ideas worth pursuing outside this specific collaboration. For example, the team could build an email list of creators it could notify about its latest reporting and projects, in case they want to talk about them. Because this program is geared toward compensating creator collaborators, disclosing that, and creating a contract, that approach would not necessarily meet the program's requirements, but it is a promising direction of its own.
For the planned Texas Tribune Festival promotional videos, the team wants to create a contract that outlines how many videos the creator must provide and the branding guidelines, and would likely work closely with the creator to tweak and finalize the videos.
As a planning-stage partnership, the Tribune has framed its results around what it is set up to learn. Chiefly, it wants to understand what creators would want or need in order to have clear direction on a proposed video while still maintaining at least some creative freedom.
Looking back, the team would focus more from the beginning on how to highlight products beyond specific stories, such as events, or distinctive tools like its Schools Explorer database of school-related data, rather than framing the creator opportunity narrowly around individual pieces of reporting.
The Tribune has not yet decided, but it may pursue the creator email-list idea, which would let creators become aware of its stories and work and choose how to highlight them without being directly affiliated with the newsroom. That way both sides could potentially benefit without running into the perception issues that could arise from a paid and disclosed sponsorship.
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