About In Fact Daily
Local government gets easier to follow when someone bothers to explain it. That is the whole job here.
In Fact Daily is an independent publication about Austin city hall and local politics. The name has a history in this town. In Fact Daily started as a daily newswire on city government, written for people who needed to keep up with what the council and the departments were doing.
We are picking it up in a different shape. Instead of a subscription wire, the site now is a plain- English explainer: how Austin governs itself, who decides what, where the money comes from and goes, and how a regular resident can follow along and actually be heard. We are not a party, a campaign, or a gadfly with an axe to grind, and we have nothing to sell you. We just think a city runs better when more of the people in it understand how it works.
What we hold to
- Independent. We answer to readers, full stop.
- Nonpartisan. We owe allegiance to the facts. If we ever run opinion, we will say so plainly.
- Honest about being wrong. When we get something wrong, we fix it fast and say we did.
- Useful before clever. Every page has to pass one test: does it help a resident understand or take part in their own city government?
On the relaunch
To be straight with you: this is a rebuilt, independently run site. It carries the In Fact Daily focus on Austin city hall forward, but the explainers here are newly written. We started with the fundamentals of how the city works, and we will keep adding.
Start with how Austin works, get into the council and the budget, or learn how to follow city hall yourself.