T-Squared: Our Spring Membership Drive

Today is the first day of our spring membership drive — one of those times of the year when we enthusiastically make the case for modest support of our best efforts. It's an easy sell, or should be. For three-and-a-half years, we've produced the kind of robust journalism, data and events that Texas needs, bringing greater transparency and accountability to public policy, politics and government in this great state of ours. Back on day one, we told you what we planned to do: We wanted to raise the level of civic engagement in communities far and wide and to return civility to our discourse on the issues that mattered. By any objective measure, we've delivered. No mission creep. No taking our eyes off the ball. No artificial inflating of our page views with cat videos or silly numbered lists. No straying across the center stripe into partisan territory.

We're particularly proud of the fact that we've remained true to the idea of being a statewide news organization. We cover matters of concern north, south, east and west — from Perryton to Roma, from Socorro to Orange. The question of whether we'd be running an Austin-only play was long ago litigated. We cover all of Texas, not just the Capitol, and we cover it for all Texans, not just insiders. We have readers and partners in big cities and small towns, on college campuses and at senior centers, in places that have traditionally had some coverage of public ed and criminal justice and energy and the rest and in places that have never had any ... until now.

Our strength, our independence, our forward momentum comes from you. While almost all of what the Tribune staff generates each day and each week can be accessed for free, your contributions — $10 from students, $35 from individuals, $60 from households and more from those of you who can afford it — enable us to do more and better work. In total, membership dollars represent about 10 percent of our annual revenue. We couldn't do this without you, but more important, we wouldn't want to. You're our stakeholders. We work for you, and we always will.

Thanks in advance for your generosity. To make a gift today, go here.