Who Writes Stories For and About Texans?

Today I am pleased to release the results of the second annual Texas Writers Byline Scan, a survey that in 2022 included 479 writers who published 2,115 print bylines in Texas magazines throughout the year. This is the second annual scan — read 2021’s results here — and it surveys an expanded landscape of 14 (up from 11 in 2021) Texas magazines across the axes of race, gender, and location.

The Texas Writers Byline Scan exists primarily to do two things: improve transparency and set a baseline for accountability in Texas magazine journalism. While some Texas magazines track byline demographics internally, none release their counts to the public, and few share data directly with staff and freelancers.

Shining a light on who is published in print in Texas magazines — and especially on which writers enjoy the highest profile, most prestigious, and usually best-paid bylines — enables journalists to have a better, data-driven understanding of our industry. For those journalists and decision-makers who are motivated to improve the diversity of writers represented in Texas magazines (in print or otherwise), the byline scan offers a level-setting mechanism by which magazines can track progress or regression.

The TWBS reports data across all 14 Texas magazines surveyed, provides side-by-side comparisons of Texas magazines across race, gender, and location, and features highlights of what I think we can learn about Texas magazine journalism based on the scan. It also details my methodology and motivations for conducting the survey.

If you’re ready to dive into the report, download it here:

If you’re just curious about which Texas magazine editors told me (politely) to fuck off, which Texas print magazines feature the most diverse bylines, and how Texas magazine writers and editors have reacted to the scan so far — read on. (Though all of that is available in the report itself, too.)

What y’all really want to know is who sucks, right?

I am sorry to disappoint you with a wanky and wonky answer, but: it’s complicated.

As you suspected, white people are disproportionately overrepresented in Texas magazines by any measure. White writers file more prestige bylines — cover stories, features, essays, commentaries, analyses, and reviews — than do writers of color. But: women and non-binary, genderfluid, genderqueer, and gender non-conforming people are overrepresented in Texas bylines compared to their makeup of the general population of Texas, though they write fewer features, essays, commentaries, and reviews, and are less likely to be featured in named teases on magazine covers. Even so, this is a notable departure from women and trans and non-binary writers’ representation in national media, where cisgender men still enjoy more bylines and credits. And while Austin writers enjoy more high-profile placements (and are overrepresented in statewide coverage magazines compared to Austin’s relative Texas population), writers in Dallas-Fort Worth are as or better represented than Austinites across all magazines.

But anyway, let’s talk about some of the scan’s most disappointing results.

• Austin Monthly — “your guide to life in Austin” — published a whopping 93% of its bylines by white writers in 2022. The magazine’s editor, Chris Hughes, did not respond to interview requests about the magazine’s diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts or its byline scan results. Chris, if you’re reading this? I would love to talk. (UPDATE: Chris reached out after the TWBS was published this morning! Byline accountability in action, etc.)

• Of 14 magazines surveyed, just one Texas magazine — Houstonia — attributed less than 50% of its bylines to white writers, and significantly so: white writers penned just 15% of bylines in Houstonia in 2022, while Black or African American writers wrote 44% of bylines, more than at any other magazine in Texas. Notably, Houstonia was the only magazine with a Black woman editor-in-chief in 2022. (Nandi Howard returned to Essence after a little over a year of editing Houstonia, and I hear that the magazine is searching for a new editor, though the job is not posted on its website.)

• Men, are you looking for clips? Pitch Fort Worth Magazine, where you will join a cohort of just 37% men writers but file 71% of bylines.

• Many Texas magazines surveyed in the scan published no bylines by non-cisgender writers in 2022. They are: 360 West, Etc. and Harrison Magazine, Discover 361, Austin Monthly, and Fort Worth Magazine.

• Two Texas magazine decision-makers — Becky Cooper at Discover 361 and Mike Tesoriero at Southlake Style — declined to participate in the survey or asked me not to contact them in the future. I hope they change their minds.

• I’m sure it’s nothing, but … weirdly, right-wing Texas writers have been kind of pissy about being asked about their racial identities over the past two years. A handful of writers have responded to the survey accusing me of peddling, in one person’s words, “leftist propaganda” — another respondent let me know that the project’s “entire narrative disgusts [them]” — while spending more time sending me all-caps emails about how I’m the “real” racist than it would take to simply fill out the survey or, even better, ignore me altogether.

• The 2022 scan was the first year I received actively hostile survey responses to my inquiry about writers’ gender, outright mocking the idea that a person might identify as anything other than “biologically” male or female. Such responses only underscore the urgent necessity of this project, especially amid increasing attacks on queer and trans people living in the U.S. that have been sadly legitimized by mainstream and legacy publications.

• No one has yet taken exception to being asked where they live.

When I ran intersectional analyses on Texas writers across race and gender, the results surprised me.

I didn’t publish these results directly in the ‘22 report — it’s already 159 pages long, and my pivot table skillset remains weak despite two years of byline counting — but looking at writers’ intersectional identities across race and gender produced some interesting results.

Unsurprisingly, non-cisgender writers of color were least represented across all Texas magazines: there were 14 non-cisgender writers of color writing for Texas magazines in 2022, compared to 465 cisgender men and women writers of any race overall.

But gender breakdowns among cisgender men and women writers threw me for something of a loop. Women writers of color were better represented (which is not to say they were well represented) at 15% of writers in Texas magazines in 2022 than were men writers of color, who made up just 9% of Texas magazine writers. Women of color filed 23% of all Texas magazine bylines, compared to men of color who filed just 8% of Texas magazine bylines. To wit: women of color writers filed a proportionally higher number of bylines than did men of color, who were overrepresented among writers compared to the number of bylines filed.

I don’t totally know what that’s about, but I reached out to writers of color who responded to the TWBS survey to talk more about those numbers. You’ll hear more from my interviews with those writers in the coming days.

I also made a big fucking dipshit mistake that illustrates how journalists’ identities and experiences bias and influence coverage.

I was disheartened by the limited geographical representation in the 2021 Texas Writers Byline Scan and aimed to cast my net wider in 2022. I did so — by expanding the ‘22 project to include three East Texas magazines and one South Central Texas magazine — but also inadvertently (and embarrassingly) illustrated how a journalist's identities and experiences can shape coverage and erase writers and their work. While I added East Texas and South Texas magazines to the survey — my family is from East Texas, and I spend a lot of time vacationing on the South Texas coast — I did not track The City magazine, which covers El Paso and Las Cruces, NM. Because The City published no issues in 2021 when I was producing the original TWBS, it fell off my (obviously faulty) radar for inclusion in 2022, when it published a full year of monthly issues. El Paso is sixth-ish among Texas’ largest metropolitan areas, but its writers are disproportionately underrepresented in the magazines scanned — just three Texas magazine writers out of 479 lived in El Paso in 2022.

I have only been to El Paso a handful of times in my life, and only when passing through the city on my way to somewhere else. The underrepresentation of El Paso writers and bylines in this survey and in Texas magazines overall was on my mind throughout the process of producing the 2022 report, but I simply forgot The City magazine existed once I became immersed in the larger project. Even though I had emailed and telephoned the magazine in the past to ask about their publication schedule and in hopes of purchasing issues for inclusion in this project, it just plain disappeared from my view — because El Paso is not a part of my personal or professional narrative or identity. It’s a bad, inexcusable error that I will correct next year, but readers of the TWBS deserve to know that the Texas byline scan would have been improved, and its byline results diversified almost certainly by geography and potentially along other metrics, if The City had been included in the 2022 survey.

None of this gets better if we don’t talk about it.

Texas magazines should reflect a modern-day Texas, but they don’t. The racial representation of writers in Texas magazines is way off — and results in less rich, culturally competent coverage. The gender representation in Texas magazines is wonky at best. The geographic representation in Texas magazines — and especially at statewide coverage magazines — is deeply disappointing.

We can’t improve the stories told for and about Texans — and the representation of writers in Texas — without being honest about where we stand today. We have to identify, admit, and correct for our mistakes. Texas magazine decision-makers have to make a genuine effort to improve their staff and freelancer diversity, which probably means paying people more, working harder to develop young and underrepresented writers, and doing more than just calling up the reliable old white guy to see what ideas he has for upcoming issues.

If Texas magazines don’t do this, they will slide (further?) into irrelevancy, and it won’t just be journalists and publishers who suffer as a result — it will be the whole of Texas’s magazine readership and Texans writ large, who deserve to read interesting, engaging stories about ourselves, our people and our homes.

So are you ready to read this thing?

Here it is:

Please share the scan with your fellow media nerds, DEI enthusiasts, and change-resistant magazine editors.