A Note From the Associate Publisher

Most of you don’t know me. I’ve never had a byline in the Chronicle, never been onstage at any of our events, nor am I the face of any particular section or initiative. But I’ve been behind the scenes here for the last 25 years, silently doing all I can to keep the wheels turning.

Maybe it’s time I introduce myself, and give you a bit of background on the issue in your hands.

It’s going to look a bit different. This is the first major print overhaul in decades, and it’s taken us the past year to get here. Some of the changes were by design. Editor Kim Jones, Art Director Zeke Barbaro, and I spent countless hours brainstorming how the Chronicle can best report on Austin, better respond to breaking news, be more visually interesting, and break through all the noise to deliver the most useful, well-informed news and event calendar in a digital-forward city of almost a million people.

And some of the changes were by necessity. I don’t need to get into the current state of media in our country, or how almost every newspaper has had its own sort of reckoning to work through.

We’ve held on to the status quo as long as we could, but we don’t have the resources we once did. We’ve let our staff organically shrink over the past several years, with fewer and fewer people taking on more and more work, and made some difficult decisions along the way too, still trying to “hold what you got,” as my father and Joe Tex would say. It’s clear that now is the opportunity to think further downfield.

But also, the I-35 expansion has been hanging over our heads for what seems like forever. With TxDOT effectively kicking us out of the building we’ve occupied for 33 years, we’ve had to move, as of last week, into the old SXSW space. It’s quite a bit smaller (if you can believe SXSW used to office out of a 1950s house, a cottage, and a petite two-story on 40th Street), so change was quite literally knocking on our door, whether we were ready for it or not.

Finally, I don’t think I’m speaking out of turn here when I say that our publisher, Nick Barbaro, will tell anyone who asks him that he’s trying to retire. Kim, Zeke, and I should probably let him soon. He quite literally has been propping this paper up, in more ways than I can even describe, so some of this evolution is us trying to envision ourselves being the stewards for the next 40 years. I can say that everyone who works here bleeds this place and wants to make him proud. We might make some mistakes through all of this, but we’ll try our level best to not let anyone down.

If you feel like supporting us, keep picking up the paper each week. Find us online – we’ve got new stories going up every day. Sign up for newsletters, follow us on socials, come on out to our events, advertise with us and be patrons of our advertisers, buy our merch online.

Or, donate. It’s not a “now more than ever”-type plea or a donation drive – it’s more that we just will always need you. We need Austin’s support to make this work.

I promise to use some of those donations to buy a dozen or two breakfast tacos then tell everyone to get back to work.

  – Cassidy Frazier, Associate Publisher