Texas Observer Says It Will Shut Down After 68 Years

The Texas Observer, a small but deep blue bastion of liberal opinion and muckraking journalism in the most populous red state, said this week that its nonprofit owner planned to lay off its staff and stop publication on Friday after 68 years.

But The Observer’s former and current staff members are fighting the shutdown and hope to avert layoffs with a last-minute online fund-raising campaign. They have raised more than $250,000 since Monday.

Former staff members have also sent a letter of protest to the board of the Texas Democracy Foundation, the nonprofit publisher of the magazine and website.

The Texas Observer is perhaps best known as the home of Molly Ivins, the liberal columnist who developed her voice as a staff member there in the 1970s. Ms. Ivins, who died in 2007, at age 62, once wrote that The Observer was a place where “you can tell the truth without the bark on it, laugh at anyone who is ridiculous, and go after the bad guys with all the energy you have, as long as you get the facts right.”

It also has a history of internal strife, and in keeping with that tradition The Observer’s editorial operation has joined the campaign. Gabriel Arana, the editor in chief, implored readers in an article on Tuesday to give money under the headline “Save The Texas Observer!”

“Given the state of affairs, especially in Texas, which is sort of at the right-wing vanguard, there’s never been a more urgent need for The Texas Observer,” Mr. Arana said in an interview.

Mr. Arana said he believed that all 16 staff members would be laid off. He said they learned of the board’s decision only on Sunday from an article in The Texas Tribune.

“Shocking,” he said.

The board’s president, Laura Hernandez Holmes, said in text messages this week that she was busy responding to the concerns of the staff and was not immediately available to answer questions.

Ms. Hernandez Holmes told The Tribune that attacks on her and the board “kind of just sucked all the energy and focus away from maintaining the financial health of the org in the last couple of months.”

“I don’t know if it’s because I’m a young woman of color talking to men,” she told The Tribune. “I often wonder if my requests and directives would have been better received coming from a man. I was not respected as the board president by senior staff.”

She added: “That’s why the hiatus is so important so that we can fulfill current obligations, make the hard decisions about the layoffs and then think about what’s possible. I’m here making sure that we can fund some severance.”

While her reference to a hiatus implied that The Observer could return in some form, Mr. Arana and a former staff member, James Canup, said that Ms. Hernandez Holmes had announced a complete shutdown with layoffs during a video call with the staff on Monday. Mr. Canup, who was managing director, said he resigned in protest after the call.

The Observer has about 4,000 subscribers to the print magazine, which publishes six times a year, in addition to its online readers, but survives primarily on donations and grants, according to Robert R. Frump, a former board member who had been running business operations as a special adviser. He, too, resigned in protest, on Thursday.

Mr. Frump said The Observer had struggled to attract younger progressive donors and that its core supporters were “aging out and not as active and not as generous as they once were.”

Still, he said that the decision to close the publication was about more than finances.

“I think the board is just tired,” Mr. Frump said. “They’ve run through a number of these controversies a few years ago. They had a blowup where 70 percent of the staff left. They’re just tired of yet another conflict.”

Under the founding editor, Ronnie Dugger, the publication, then a weekly newspaper, proclaimed its independence in its first issue on Dec. 13, 1954. “We will serve no group or party but will hew hard to the truth as we find it and the right as we see it,” it said.

Its writers have long prided themselves on covering stories about political corruption, corporate influence and racial and economic injustice.

The planned closure comes as other media outlets, including NPR, Vox Media, CNN and The Washington Post, have announced staff cuts in recent months.

Ms. Ivins once wrote that the most striking thing about The Texas Observer was its journalistic excellence.

“The second most striking thing about this small magazine is what a frayed shoestring it operates on,” she wrote in “Fifty Years of the Texas Observer,” a collection of its journalism, published in 2004. “The Observer has just never had any money. It’s the journalistic equivalent of the loaves and fishes.”

In 2001, she and Louis Dubose donated proceeds from their book, “Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush,” to help pay staff salaries.

Former staff members wrote in their letter to the board that The Observer “has done what no other Texas publication dared: remain beholden to no one but the people of Texas.”

That’s why it’s such a shame that it has not had more readers, Mr. Canup said in an interview. “The words are powerful and ought to be influential.”