Houston Chronicle
The Houston Chronicle is the largest daily newspaper in Houston, Texas, United States. As of April 2016, it is the third-largest newspaper by Sunday circulation in the United States, behind only The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. With its 1995 buy-out of long-time rival the Houston Post, the Chronicle became Houston's newspaper of record.
Type
Daily newspaper
Nancy Meyer
Kelly Ann Scott
1901
Houston Chronicle Building, 4747 Southwest Fwy., Houston, Texas 77027
United States
142,785 (as of 2023)[1]
The Houston Chronicle is the largest daily newspaper owned and operated by the Hearst Corporation, a privately held multinational corporate media conglomerate with $10 billion in revenues. The paper employs nearly 2,000 people, including approximately 300 journalists, editors, and photographers. The Chronicle has bureaus in Washington, D.C., and Austin. It reports that its web site averages 125 million page views per month.[2]
The publication serves as the "newspaper of record" of the Houston area.[3] Previously headquartered in the Houston Chronicle Building at 801 Texas Avenue, Downtown Houston, the Houston Chronicle is now located at 4747 Southwest Freeway.[4]
In addition to its daily print edition, the Chronicle offers Chron.com, a free online-only, ad-supported newspaper covering breaking news, weather, traffic, pop culture, and city life. Houstonchronicle.com, launched in 2012, is a subscriber-only paper that contains everything found in the daily print edition.[5]
Other publications[edit]
In April 2004 the Houston Chronicle began carrying a Spanish-language supplement, the entertainment magazine La Vibra. La Vibra caters to speakers of Spanish and bilingual English-Spanish speakers, and is mainly distributed in Hispanic neighborhoods. In December 2004 the Chronicle acquired the Spanish-language newspaper La Voz de Houston.[35]
Criticism[edit]
Robert Jensen on the September 11 attacks[edit]
In the weeks following the September 11 attacks, the Houston Chronicle published a series of opinion articles by University of Texas journalism professor Robert Jensen that asserted the United States was "just as guilty" as the hijackers in committing acts of violence and compared that attack with the history of U.S. attacks on civilians in other countries. The opinion piece resulted in hundreds of angry letters to the editor and reportedly over 4,000 angry responses to Jensen.[60]
Among them were claims of insensitivity against the newspaper and of giving an unduly large audience to a position characterized as being extremist. University of Texas president Larry Faulkner issued a response denouncing Jensen's as "a fountain of undiluted foolishness on issues of public policy", noting "[h]e is not speaking in the University's name and may not speak in its name."[61]
Light rail controversy[edit]
The document was online for only an hour, but long enough to be viewed by some readers. Soon after, the Houston Review, a conservative newspaper published by students at the University of Houston, printed the memo's full text and an accompanying commentary that criticized the paper.[62][63]
Harris County District Attorney Rosenthal later dismissed the Chronicle's complaint, finding it without merit on the grounds that the statute did not apply. Rosenthal's involvement in the probe itself came under fire by the Houston Press, which in editorials questioned whether Rosenthal was too close to TTM: from 2000 to 2004, Rosenthal accepted some $30,000 in donations from known TTM supporters.[64]
Sandoval family interview[edit]
In early 2004, Chronicle reporter Lucas Wall interviewed the family of Leroy Sandoval, a Marine from Houston who was killed in Iraq. After the article appeared, Sandoval's stepfather and sister called into Houston talk radio station KSEV and said that a sentence alleging "President Bush's failure to find weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq misrepresented their views on the war and President George W. Bush, that Wall had pressured them for a quotation that criticized Bush, and that the line alleging Bush's "failure" was included against the wishes of the family.[65]
A dispute ensued between KSEV radio show host/owner Dan Patrick and an assistant managing editor at the Chronicle. The incident prompted Patrick to join the call for a boycott of the paper.[66] The story was also picked up by the local Houston television stations and, a week later, the O'Reilly Factor. Eventually, Chronicle publisher Jack Sweeney contacted the Sandoval family to apologize.[66]
Purchase of Houston Post assets[edit]
Internal memos obtained via FOIA from the Justice Department antitrust attorneys who investigated the closing of the Houston Post said the Chronicle's parent organization struck a deal to buy the Post six months before it closed. The memos, first obtained by the alternative paper the Houston Press, say the Chronicle's conglomerate and the Post "reached an agreement in October, 1994, for the sale of Houston Post Co.'s assets for approximately $120 million."[67]
Tom DeLay poll[edit]
In January 2006 the Chronicle hired Richard Murray of the University of Houston to conduct an election survey in the district of U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay, in light of his 2005 indictment by District Attorney Ronnie Earle for alleged campaign money violations. The Chronicle said that its poll showed "severely eroded support for U.S. Rep Tom DeLay in his district, most notably among Republicans who have voted for him before."[68]
Former Texas Secretary of State Jack Rains contacted the Chronicle's James Howard Gibbons, alleging that the poll appeared to incorrectly count non-Republican Primary voters in its sample. Rains also asserted that Murray had a conflict of interest in the poll, as Murray's son Keir was a political consultant working for Nick Lampson, DeLay's Democratic challenger in 2006.[69]
Other Controversies[edit]
The Houston Chronicle has faced significant challenges with its journalistic integrity. In 2020, the paper faced allegations of publishing articles without properly adhering to its own ethics policy, especially in regards to contacting subjects before publishing negative portrayals. There were also claims suggesting retaliation against individuals for not purchasing advertisements.[70] This trust was further eroded in 2018 when the Chronicle retracted eight articles after it was revealed they were significantly based on sources whose existence could not be verified.[71] An extensive review of the articles penned by Austin bureau chief Mike Ward showed that out of 275 individuals he quoted in various stories, 44% could not be located or confirmed.[72] Beyond the retractions, an additional 64 of Ward's stories required corrections due to the inclusion of unverified sources, further tainting the paper's credibility. This was a result of an examination of a whopping 744 stories written by Ward since January 2014, with independent investigators unable to verify the existence of nearly half of the individuals he had quoted.[73]
Availability of Houston Post articles[edit]
Some Houston Post articles had been made available in the archives of the Houston Chronicle website, but by 2005 they were removed. The Houston Chronicle online editor Mike Read said that the Houston Chronicle decided to remove Houston Post articles from the website after the 2001 United States Supreme Court New York Times Co. v. Tasini decision; the newspaper originally planned to filter articles not allowed by the decision and to post articles that were not prohibited by the decision. The Houston Chronicle decided not to post or re-post any more Houston Post articles because of difficulties in complying with the New York Times Co. v. Tasini decision with the resources that were available to the newspaper.[74]
People interested in reading Houston Post articles may view them on microfilm. The Houston Public Library has the newspaper on microfilm from 1880 to 1995 and the Houston Post Index from 1976 to 1994. The 1880–1900 microfilm is in the Texas and Local History Department of the Julia Ideson Building, while 1900–1995 is in the Jesse H. Jones Building, the main building of the Central Library. In addition, the M.D. Anderson Library at the University of Houston has the Houston Post available on microfilm from 1880 to 1995, and the Houston Post Index from 1976 to 1979 and from 1987 to 1994.[74]