Former Nashville Journo Proclaimed A ‘News Innovator’

By Kleinheider Posted on July 19, 2009 at 5:03 pm

It’s Trent Seibert. Here’s his story of how he got his current project Texas Watchdog started:

When the Sam Adams Alliance gave us our start-up money, part of the deal was that if we were to make this work, we would have to be in a place with a big enough market for this kind of journalism, a place where we can sustain the work we do. There are only a few places in the U.S. to do that, and I hate to say that because I was living in Nashville, Tennessee, at the time and I love Nashville. But you need to be in a state with a big media market, and that means California, New York, or Texas. These are the places where America’s ideas come from, for good or for bad. So, we ended up picking Houston, Texas, as a place to launch this idea.

In part we thought it was a great market down here, because it’s a big city that wasn’t drenched in media. There was room for us. And Houston has more than it’s share of billionaires, so we thought we might be able to knock on a door and make a 501(c)(3) work.

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