John Thornton, Venture Capitalist Who Founded The Texas Tribune, Dies at 59
John Thornton, a financier who leveraged his wealth and influence to embark on the seemingly quixotic mission of reviving local journalism in a time of crisis, by founding The Texas Tribune, a seminal regional nonprofit news organization, and the American Journalism Project, which supports local digital newsrooms around the country, died on Saturday in Austin, Texas. He was 59.
His death, by suicide, followed a long mental health struggle, a spokesman for the American Journalism Project said.
Mr. Thornton helped change the financial model for sustainable local journalism when, in 2009, he founded The Texas Tribune, a member-supported, digital-only, nonpartisan media organization. The Tribune, which began with 11 reporters and editors focusing largely on Texas state politics, now has a newsroom of more than 50 staff members covering local issues in all 254 counties in the state, in addition to a congressional reporter in Washington.
That success inspired Mr. Thornton to try to replicate the model nationwide with the American Journalism Project, a “venture philanthropy” effort, as he termed it, based in Washington. He started it in 2019 with Elizabeth Green, a founder of Chalkbeat, a nonprofit education news organization.
Both The Tribune and the journalism project aimed to fill the gaps created by the decline or disappearance of local legacy news organizations in an era when more Americans were turning to far-flung corners of the internet and social media for news — or something resembling it. That decline had depleted the ranks of reporters who might have otherwise ferreted out local corruption and tracked the billions spent by city and state governments.
Mr. Thornton’s idea was to tap big philanthropies, wealthy donors and grass-roots supporters to create nonprofit digital news outlets “that would play the role of the American newspaper, but be funded as civic institutions, like the ballet,” Sarabeth Berman, the chief executive of the American Journalism Project, said in an interview.
With support from socially minded groups like Emerson Collective, founded by Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs, and Arnold Ventures, headquartered in Houston, the project has raised more than $225 million to help fund 50 local digital nonprofit news outlets in 36 states, as well as providing strategic assistance.
The first 22 newsrooms that were funded have, on average, doubled in size since receiving their grants and created jobs for more than 200 journalists, according to the organization.
“It’s not an exaggeration to say John Thornton changed American journalism — and saved it,” Evan Smith, a co-founder of The Tribune, said in a statement. “No one made him do this. He believed in standing up and supporting, with his time and money, the right kind of news organizations around the country because he knew the consequences of the vast need going unmet.”
Even so, Mr. Thornton — as a top executive of Austin Ventures, where he helped oversee more than $4 billion in assets under management — did not begin his foray into journalism as a crusader for truth.
“In my day job, I’m a venture capitalist, so like much else in my life, this one was born out of a quest for financial gain,” he wrote in The Tribune in 2009, recounting its original mission. “In 2007, it struck my partners and me that the steady decline of the once-nearly-$60-billion American newspaper industry should present some financial opportunities for firms like ours.”
He and his Austin Ventures team concluded that local newspapers looked like a perilous investment. But the perils to the American political system seemed to them even greater if their mission went unfulfilled. “The commercial press,” he added, “is too fragile for our democracy to rely on for all the news and information that we require to function as responsible citizens.”
John Douglas Thornton was born on April 9, 1965, in Wichita, Kan. After getting his diploma from Wichita Northwest High School in 1983, he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Trinity University in San Antonio, graduating first in his class in 1987.
He worked for McKinsey & Company before heading to Stanford University, where he received a Master of Business Administration degree in 1991. Then he joined Austin Ventures, where he guided nearly 50 software investments.
The Austin Ventures team “very quickly determined that there had to be easier ways to make money” than investing in journalism, Mr. Thornton recalled. In a 2010 interview with The Columbia Journalism Review, he described a “stultifying” meeting in which suggestions for saving newspapers included publishing more photos of pets.
“I thought, ‘It’s been two hours and journalism hasn’t been mentioned,’” he said. “That’s when the light went on for me, that maybe public-service journalism” is a “public good just like national defense, clean air, clean water.”
Armed with little more than a fuzzy concept, he persuaded Mr. Smith, the former editor of the award-winning magazine Texas Monthly, to be The Texas Tribune’s editor in chief and president, and Ross Ramsey, a prominent reporter and editor in Texas, to be executive editor.
“We did not have a business plan,” Mr. Smith said in an interview. “We didn’t have any research that we had done on the feasibility of this. We did not do any focus groups. What we had was a piece of brown butcher paper from a barbecue restaurant on which we had scribbled notes about what we wanted this thing to be.”
As The Tribune’s first chairman, Mr. Thornton supplied an initial $1 million in seed capital and another $1 million the next year. By the end of 2009, The Tribune had attracted about $4 million in funding, including $500,000 from Houston Endowment, $250,000 from Knight Foundation and $2,500 each from more than 60 corporate sponsors.
It turned out to be money well spent. Over the years, The Tribune has won Peabody and Edward R. Murrow awards, among many others, and last year was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for its investigation, in partnership with ProPublica and the PBS program “Frontline,” into the police response to the 2022 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
The Tribune has been credited as an inspiration for similar outlets throughout the country, including CalMatters in California, The Nevada Independent and the Pulitzer-winning Mississippi Today.
By the time Mr. Thornton stepped down from The Tribune board in 2022, the organization had raised about $120 million from individuals, foundations and corporations. “I would describe that as a trick worthy of Houdini,” said Mr. Smith, who also stepped down around that time.
Mr. Thornton is survived by his wife, Erin Thornton, whom he married in 2019, and his stepsons, Wyatt and Wade Driscoll. His marriage to Julie Blakeslee ended in divorce in 2010.
Mr. Thornton’s finance career continued while he remained involved with journalism. In 2016, he and Chris Pacitti, a longtime Austin Ventures partner, founded Elsewhere Partners, a firm that invests in bootstrapped software companies.
But the need to find new ways to speak truth to power remained front of mind. In recent years, Mr. Thornton saw his groundbreaking news model as more crucial than ever, given the continuing woes of local and regional newspapers and websites.
“My local paper came on the market 18 months ago or so, and I had wealthy, really civically big-hearted friends who said, ‘Well, what do you think?’” Mr. Thornton said in a 2020 interview with Vox. “And my response was, ‘Well, what are they going to pay you to take it?’”
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