Terri Langford is our new senior reporter for health and human services

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As our health and human services editor since 2021, Terri Langford has overseen coverage of historic developments in Texas, including the criminalization of abortion and the state’s emergence from the most acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. Her intelligence, grit and passion for news have been evident in Eleanor Klibanoff’s prize-winning coverage of women’s health and Stephen Simpson’s success as our first mental health reporter.

When Karen Brooks Harper, our public health reporter since 2020, announced that she was leaving to become a senior politics reporter for the Dallas Morning News, we knew we needed someone who could write with mastery and authority on a beat that encompasses hospitals, Medicaid, aging, disability, caregiving, epidemiology and more. In discussing the future of the role with Terri, it became clear that few journalists would be better suited for this task than she.

In a state filled with big stories and big-league journalists, Terri stands out as someone who has done it all. For the Associated Press, where she worked from 1990 to 1999, Terri helped cover the 1991 Luby’s shooting in Killeen and 1993 Branch Davidian siege in Waco and was the lead reporter on the 1998 murder of James Byrd Jr. in Jasper. As an investigative reporter at the Dallas Morning News, Terri broke key stories about the child welfare system, detailing the deaths of foster children in state custody and the bureaucratic failings that allowed a jobless Houston woman to adopt seven children and then abandon them in Nigeria.

Moving over to the Houston Chronicle in 2004, Terri covered the plight of a group of mentally disabled Texas men who had been sent to work at an Iowa meat-processing plant in the 1970s and paired up with Texas Tribune reporter Emily Ramshaw — later the Tribune’s editor in chief, and now the co-founder and CEO of The 19th — to cover the abuse of foster children in residential treatment centers. She investigated how Houston became the center of ambulance Medicaid fraud.

After a stint covering New Jersey for WNYC and New Jersey Public Radio, Terri joined the Tribune (for the first time) in 2014, covering criminal justice, courts and regulatory issues in Texas, including how Texas procures death row drugs; the haphazard way Texas sheriffs screen for undocumented immigrants; how a system of mental health checks in state jails failed Sandra Bland; and problems with Texas’ use of private contractors.

In 2016, Terri returned to the Dallas Morning News as an investigative reporter. She then covered criminal justice for Honolulu Civil Beat and was an editor and producer at Austin public-radio station KUT, working on the current-events show Texas Standard, before rejoining the Tribune in 2021.

Born in Oceanside, California, Terri grew up in California, Texas, the Carolinas, Virginia, Maryland, and England, with a father who was a marine aviator. She graduated from UT Austin, where she reported for The Daily Texan. Terri’s career demonstrates the value not only of persistence, deep sourcing and a hunger for scoops, but also of taking on new challenges. And in the Tribune newsroom, no position is as challenging — and essential — as that of reporter.

After the Uvalde tragedy, Terri dived back into reporting at my request, producing the first major account of what security cameras recorded inside Robb Elementary School. I am deeply appreciative that she is taking on this critical new challenge and can’t wait to read the revelatory reporting she will produce. Please join me in congratulating Terri on her next chapter.

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Just in: Former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyoming; U.S. Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pennsylvania; and Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt will take the stage at The Texas Tribune Festival, Sept. 5–7 in downtown Austin. Buy tickets today!