Texas Public Radio to merge operations with nonprofit San Antonio Report

Texas Public Radio and nonprofit newsroom San Antonio Report plan to merge operations beginning in July. 

The boards of both organizations voted unanimously May 11 to approve a charitable donation agreement that transfers San Antonio Report’s assets to TPR. Once merged, the organizations will continue to operate separate newsrooms as leadership develops long-term integration plans, said TPR CEO Ashley Alvarado. 

“As a united organization, our commitment to independent local journalism will not change,” Alvarado said in a Tuesday release announcing the merger. “This effort will be a force multiplier, allowing us to reach new audiences and cover the San Antonio region with a greater breadth and depth than ever before.”

San Antonio Report CEO and Publisher Angie Mock told Current that the move will bolster the nonprofit newsroom, which is smaller than TPR and lacks needed administrative infrastructure. The merger will create a stronger and more sustainable model for local journalism in the San Antonio market, she said.

“One of our readers sent us a text yesterday and said, ‘This is a match made in journalism heaven,’” Mock said. “We really needed to have systems and infrastructure to support our newsroom, and TPR brings …  great support systems and great teams that now can support this group of journalists … doing really, really good work.”

A long time coming

The possibility of a merger arose in 2017 when San Antonio Report, then Rivard Report, converted to nonprofit status, Mock said. This prospect began to crystallize in late 2024, when Alvarado was appointed TPR’s CEO following the death of previous CEO Joyce Slocum earlier that year. 

Before Alvarado arrived, TPR had already done strategic work concerning “investing in digital and thinking about how we could best serve community members,” Alvarado said. But the organization wanted to move past its leadership transition before proceeding with any merger or digital transformation. Discussions with San Antonio Report began progressing shortly after she took the helm. 

“I was here for about six months and then said, ‘Hey, ready to have a conversation?’” Alvarado said. “In that time, we were able to think about how complementary the organizations are and what could be possible there.”

TPR and San Antonio Report commissioned outside consultants early last summer to examine whether a merger would strengthen both organizations, Alvarado said. In the year that followed, the organizations analyzed the report and “all of its aspects” to make a “really informed decision” about moving forward, she said. 

Both organizations are entering the merger from “a position of strength,” Mock said. After dealing with operating deficits since 2020, according to tax filings, 2025 was the “strongest financial year we’ve ever had,” she said. The merger was “something we want to do, not something we have to do.” The organizations had a combined annual revenue of $10 million in 2025. 

For TPR, a “tremendous response” from the San Antonio community filled a budget gap left by the rescission of federal public broadcasting funds last year, Alvarado said. CPB provided TPR with roughly $355,000 of its $7.6 million operating budget for FY25. 

An emergency fund drive following the rescission raised over $500,000, and the station’s fall fundraiser brought in $1 million. 

Additionally, TPR and San Antonio Report raised around $1.4 million in local contributions supporting merger-related expenses, including the outside analysis. 

Funders include health nonprofit Community Labs; local business leaders Charles Butt, chairman of the grocery chain H-E-B, and San Antonio Spurs President Gregg Popovich; and the 80/20 Foundation, the Impetus Foundation, the John and Florence Newman Foundation, the Lifshutz Foundation, the San Antonio Area Foundation and the Tobin Endowment.

“That’s not just philanthropic action; that is a true understanding with the philanthropists, with the business leaders and the community leaders, of just how important credible local news and civic engagement is for our community,” Mock said. 

Getting it right

Once the merger takes effect July 1, leaders of both organizations will begin work on integration planning, including decisions about how the new media group will be branded. Their newsrooms will continue running separately during this early phase. 

“We don’t want to rush this,” Alvarado said. “In the immediate term, if you love San Antonio Report, you’re going to continue to get to experience San Antonio Report. It’s part of the broader TPR network that will be really intentional, not only in involving community and staff input and the research, but also communicating that along the way.”

Having worked at LAist as it underwent its own digital transformation, Alvarado said she learned valuable lessons about “the power of research, having the data to make decisions, taking time and not rushing things so that you can get it right.”

“We want to take that time, and we also want to be intentional with how we’re working with staff through all of the transition,” she said, adding that it’s important not to “disrupt the experience that our audiences and community members have really grown to love with each brand.”

The “diversity of coverage is going to be consistent with what audiences have expected from both organizations,” Alvarado said.

All but two of San Antonio Report’s staff will retain their roles. Mock will transition from CEO into a transformational gifts officer role for a year, while Editor-in-Chief Leigh Munsil will become senior VP of news and EIC across both news teams. 

“This is about keeping the positions that we have,” Alvarado said. “As we see opportunities, we’ll think about every position and how it’s best suited to support the combined organization, but there’s no planned consolidation of roles.”

Following the merger, 31 journalists will work across both newsrooms, which is the “most that either organization has ever had,” she added. 

“We’re looking at having roughly the same number of folks on the administrative side and recognizing that we really need to bolster our ability to generate and maintain revenue, to support the employee experience,” Alvarado said. Plans to recruit a new human resources staffer will “make sure that we’re sustainable in every definition of that word and moving forward strongly together,” she said.

The boards of the two organizations will become one board overseeing the company. The board chair of San Antonio Report will serve as an officer on the new board, Mock said. 

Under the merger, the organizations expect to save a combined $400,000 annually, Mock said. 

‘A match made in journalism heaven’

In addition to growing the new organization’s audience, engagement and financial resources, survival amid the turbulent public media landscape will be a pivotal metric over the next few years, Alvarado said. 

“A funder used to say, ‘We need to embrace survival as a success metric,’” Alvarado said. “With so much disruption, with so many challenges for a long time, it has been survival as the success metric.”

But the merger isn’t a survival play, but “a growth play,” Alvarado said. She hopes it will provide a model for other nonprofit media organizations. 

The merger explores “what it means to bring together an organization that does have a lot of infrastructure with an agile but maybe under-resourced digital nonprofit to get those complementary offerings together,” she said. 

As Mock sees it, the newsrooms will be primed to better serve the San Antonio community through a shared commitment to “local, independent, high-quality news information and civic engagement.” 

“We’re going to have the ability to reach so many more people in this community through the multiplatform that we now have, and also just the growth that lies ahead,” she said. “We just couldn’t be more excited about that.”