Robert Rivard is a newsman, editor, publisher and fount of knowledge regarding San Antonio's path over the past few decades. Currently, The Rivard Report is covering multiple major issues including the racial justice protests and COVID-19. We were so honored to get him on the show.

Transcript:

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Justin Hill: Hello in Bienvenido, San Antonio. Welcome to the Alamo Hour discussing the people, places, and passion that make our city. My name is Justin Hill, a local attorney, a proud San Antonion and keeper of chickens and bees. On the Alamo Hour, you'll get to hear from the people that make San Antonio great and unique and the best kept secret in Texas. We're glad that you're here.

All right. Welcome to the Alamo Hour. Today's guest is Robert Rivard. Robert needs a little introduction in San Antonio. He's the editor and publisher of The Rivard Report which I think personally is the premier news outlet in San Antonio and one of these few news outlets that isn't focused on clickbait and things like that. I really appreciate the fact that they focus on news that matters to all of us. Robert is a published author. He was previously the editor of the San Antonio Express. He's worked at Newsweek. He's won numerous awards, including editor of the year in 2000. Robert, my law firm supports The Rivard Report, I think everybody should support The Rivard Report.

I personally want to thank you for what you all do and how-- Sunlight's the best disinfectant and you all are the best sunlight in the city. Thank you for being here and thank you for what you do.

Robert Rivard: Thanks for the kind words, Justin, and thanks for your support. Thanks for the invitation to everyone listening today or watching to join in that support.

Justin: Yes, and I'm going to encourage everybody, if you have not reached out to The Rivard Report and support it, every little bit helps. You all do what you all do, which is great for the city. I'm also messing with this video right now, because of course when you get here, one of my biggest guests, I'm going to have some technical difficulties. The audio is on though. Robert, we start every episode and we go through every episode with a little bit about caller commentary, where you're from, what do you do, what do you like, when, and why did you move to San Antonio?

Robert: I moved here with my wife, Monika Maeckle and our two very young sons in 1989. I left Newsweekmagazine in New York, my wife wanted to come back to Texas and raise the boys here. My whole career, before I joined Newsweek, was in Texas starting as a sports reporter at The Brownsville Herald and moving to the news side there and then up to the Corpus Christi Caller and then the Dallas Times Herald, which sent me to Latin America to cover civil wars in the 1980s and that's where Newsweek and I connected.

It became time to make some choices between the fast track of my career in New York and around the world. I was managing Newsweek's bureaus all over the world, which was a very exciting job for me, but for my wife with two young baby boys, it wasn't the ideal family situation. I was smart enough to listen to her and choose family over career and that's what brought us to San Antonio, back to Texas in 1989.

Justin: Where are you from originally?

Robert: Well, I was born at the top of the mitten, as we say in Michigan, in Petoskey on Lake Michigan. I'm French Canadian by heritage. Rivard, down here it could be Riveda or Rios. I spent my boyhood in Michigan. My father was a traveling salesman. I moved around, lived in a number of states; Pennsylvania, and New York, Kansas. I eventually found my way, as a young man, down to Brownsville and that's where I started my journalism career.

Justin: Top of the mitten to the bottom of the state.

Robert: Top of the mitten.

Justin: How far from Traverse City?

Robert: Very close, an hour.

Justin: I'd never heard the mitten thing. I lived under a rock, I guess, but I have a good friend and that's what she said. She did this and pointed to the top.

Robert: Top of the mitten.

Justin: Okay, now I know.

Robert: Here's a mitten on my key chain.

Justin: Okay, fair enough.

Robert: I keep close to my roots.

Justin: Well, she just kept sticking her hand up at me and saying, "Top of the mitten." I thought she was having a stroke or something, I had no idea what she was talking about. What are your personal main sources of news?

Robert: Well, I'm a little obsessive-compulsive about news. Before I came here, I was reading The Atlanticmagazine online. Everything I read is digital, I haven't seen print products for years. We still get the Sunday New York Times. My wife likes to have the physical copy and I find myself enjoying going through the pages there, although I've probably read most of what I'm looking at days earlier online. Every morning or every night, really, before I go to bed, I read The New York Times and Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, the three national publications. Most of what's in their morning publications is online the previous evening, and I want to read that. I obviously read everything that we publish and I still read the Express-News. I can't read mysanantonio.com, I couldn't read it when I worked as editor there.

Justin: Okay. What is the difference, because I can't figure out why one is like us weekly of news and one still seems to be news?

Robert: It's clickbait.

Justin: Okay.

Robert: You want to tell advertisers that millions of people are coming to your site, so you put Eva Longoria in a bikini on a slideshow and you've got a couple of man-bite dog stories and junk from all over the world.

Justin: You won't believe what he caught in the Gulf of Mexico dot, dot, dot. I see those.

Robert: Yes. At least advertisers of a certain age and demographic fall prey to that and think they're connecting with large audiences. The expressnews.com, they have some very serious, very accomplished journalists there still even after all the downsizing over the years, and they're doing some great work.

Justin: We're going to get into that more, but that's part of the influence that is not with The Rivard Report, is you do not have the pressures of advertisers and things like that, to where you feel the need to get this clickbait numbers up. You all are nonprofit, right?

Robert: That's correct.

Justin: And nonpartisan.

Robert: We're nonpartisan, we're non-profit, and it doesn't mean that we don't have pressures, because we have the pressure of raising several million dollars a year to support the 20 full-time people that are working there, and the number of freelancers and the overhead and so forth. It's a different kind of situation, but it does give us some editorial independence from the for-profit model. The primary independence it gives us, Justin, is that most newspapers, virtually all newspapers, are owned by corporate entities that are not located in the communities where they publish.

The financial and economic disruption in the media business has been such that most of those corporate owners no longer pay any pretense of caring about community, putting community first, being a public trust. It's all about making the bottom-line work and surviving in a very competitive world where the internet's disrupted everything. Many journalists across the country have done what I've done. I was early doing it. We're eight and a half years old. There's 230 nonprofit digital media sites now in American cities across the country, some more successful than others. We're certainly in the top 10% of those entities for both the size of our audience, our revenue streams, the quality of the journalism we're doing, but it's happening everywhere.

We can't pretend to fill the role that US newspapers once played in communities, where they were everything to everybody, but we do our part in helping fill in an increasingly large vacuum.

Justin: We're going to talk a little bit more about that. You also had a history with the San Antonio Light, which when I moved here didn't even exist. There's all that history there that is gone forever, but we're going to talk a little bit about that. A little bit more about your San Antonio love and connections and fields, what are some of your favorite places in San Antonio that are off the beaten path?

Robert: Well, the river defines the city for me. I'm a cyclist, I like to be on road bike. I was the founding captain of the Third Street Grackles cycling team back in the day. From 2005 to 2015, we raised about $500 million for multiple sclerosis research and rode the MS 150 every year-

Justin: Very cool.

Robert: -to the coast or later to New Braunfels when they changed the course. I'm not doing those kinds of long-distance rides, but I'm still on my bike all the time. I was at the protest. For the last several nights, I've been on my bike riding along the protest to observe as a journalist. I like the river, I particularly like the Mission Reach. Very few people are familiar with the four-mile extension of the Mission Reach below Mission Espada that's opened up and it is amazing. We have some of the amazing urban nature in San Antonio. My wife is a citizen scientist, Monika Maeckle. She founded the San Antonio Monarch Butterfly and Pollinator Festival at the Pearl.

Justin: I went this year to one of the events at the Stables.

Robert: She was, I think, the real catalyst for us becoming the first Monarch Champion City in the United States when Ivy Taylor was mayor. She's written a lot about urban nature both for her blog, the Texas Butterfly Ranch, and just also for The Rivard Report and I get to tag along on all that.

Justin: I had no idea your wife was Texas Butterfly Ranch.

Robert: The other day, I spent time with her and a biologist or a botanist from the San Antonio River Authority removing Chinese snail eggs from the King William Reach that are invasive. Somebody took their pet snails out of an aquarium and threw them in the river and we now have an invasive species problem. My wife's out there, doing battle against Chinese snails. Of course, I'm in a kayak next to her tagging along.

Justin: Support.

Robert: That's my idea of a good time when I've got downtime. One of our two adult sons, Alexander, who's a schoolteacher and owns a coffee business in town, he's kind of a pro-level Scrabble player and I've become addicted to Scrabble later in life. I can't seem to beat him except when I get lucky, but Scrabble keeps my brain working, the wiring good keeps me young.

Justin: I've decided I'm really good at Scrabble if I picked my opponents wisely, so that's sort of metric, but it's great. I didn't know your wife was part of the Texas Butterfly Ranch. We got certified at-- my home is a certified Monarch waystation now. We planted all the things and did all the water. We've got local milkweed, not the tropical, so we're taking it all real seriously.

Robert: You're going to make her very happy.

Justin: Yes, now it's great.

Robert: She oversaw the 300 pollinator gardens initiative in our tricentennial year-

Justin: Oh, cool.

Robert: -and those signs that you have of her, those are her signs.

Justin: Well, tell her that. It's something I don't tell people because it's a weird thing I do at the home, but--

Robert: More people are doing it than ever before.

Justin: That's great to know. Okay. What is the single biggest challenge for an independent nonprofit news outlet like yours?

Robert: Well, the biggest challenge for me was at age 59, starting something from scratch. I say that because I came out of a 30 or 35-year career at the time having worked for five major global media companies. I didn't necessarily consider myself a corporate guy, but I was not part of what my friend Graham Weston called the startup culture of San Antonio. After I retired from the Express News or really what I call my divorce from the Express News, Graham invited me out to Rackspace and he said, "Leave your suit at home and we're going to come get your corporate skin off."

I said, "Graham, I don't have any corporate skin." He goes, "Just come out here." It was coming out into the land of tattoos and piercings and low office lighting, and that's really where I started to hang out with people that were mostly in their 20s and 30s that were completely focused on starting up their own enterprises, whether they were software enterprises, or whatever they were doing, they were trying to solve problems with technology. It really helped me pivot at an age when most people really are coming toward the end of their career and not reinventing themselves. Frankly, it was one of the most enriching experiences of my life.

Justin: When you took him up on that, did you know that the next goal was to start an independent web-based media or a news service?

Robert: He was urging me to do that, to keep my voice in the community. I had him backing me, and I had the greatest philanthropist the city or state's ever known, Charles Butt, the CEO and chairman of HEB. We shared many philosophical viewpoints toward the need to improve public education outcomes in the inner city. He was somebody I greatly admired for the company. It's philanthropy, his personal philanthropy. Those were two really strong mentors who helped me see my way through with Monica who helped me co-found The RivardReport really as a blog and it just took off.

It took off in terms of audience, it took off and people wanting to advertise to the point where a couple of years into its publication, people started approaching me about buying equity positions in it. I tried very hard because I had been up in that startup world. I'd been one of the first things at Geekdom when it was at the Western center and then at the Rand. I was going to use the money to scale up because I think we were four people at the time. Ultimately, we were never going to make the kind of money that venture capitalists want on their investments.

Some of the same people who were very philanthropic beyond Graham and Charles, but people like Lew Moorman, the president of Rackspace, John Newman, Chico Newman, the head of Newman Family Foundation. They convinced me to go nonprofit. That was 2015. That was not an easy step to take because my wife and I had built with sweat equity quite an enterprise and it was really something that was having an increasingly influential place in the media landscape. It meant surrendering it all, including our own financial investor to a nonprofit, but it was the right thing to do and there was something about the community's perception of The Rivard Report once it became nonprofit.

I thought it had been building fantastically but it really took off after that. We really quickly scaled up to the size we're at now, as people started to become donating members, more philanthropists joined us. Many of the leading foundations in San Antonio made significant multi-year commitments.

People wanted quality, credible journalism, and civic engagement that we were offering where we weren't doing the crime blotter, we weren't doing clickbait, we weren't doing celebrity gossip and news. We weren't intensely negative. We weren't sensational. The college-educated, engaged citizen, the person who votes, the people that are really making the city go, they wanted something that was of higher purpose, and our mission-driven journalism as a nonprofit really resonated with people and the result is what you see today.

Justin: The donors' list is a who's who of San Antonio, philanthropists and foundations. Now, I was going through it before you got here.

Robert: It's pretty impressive. I have a really strong business team. It's run by three of the four people are Trinity grads, Jenna Mallette, our chief operating officer, Katy Silva, our development director, Kassie Kelly, our membership director, and then Laura Lopez, who's a roadrunner me, UTSA, she's our event coordinator. When we look at what we accomplish, not only with our individual and business membership base, which is in the thousands now, but also just with our annual City Fest, our annual education forum, our annual medical forum, we're doing civic engagement events every month, and now we're doing them virtually. They're attracting really strong audiences of community leaders, people in the neighborhoods that just have a real appetite for that kind of what I would call really nutritious journalism.

Justin: It's media, it's dense, it's actual information about real issues instead of a glossing over. The funny thing is when I'll see or cover something, there's not alternatives to the coverage, it's stuff that nobody's covering that I think what makes you also more so invaluable to the city is there's no alternative means of getting some of that information in terms of which I'll cover.

We'll get back to it, but you personally also write. I always make sure to read yours because there are always a more macro feel it seems to me. Is there any specific type of coverage that you prefer? Do you like the politics? Do you like the culture? Do you like what's happening in the city? Is there a specific angle that you prefer to cover?

Robert: Well, I've always been a writing editor. Of course, I was a reporter and writer for a long time at different newspapers and then at Newsweek, but I've always believed that editors are the strongest editors lead by writing, and that the reporters and others who are in the organization can see that you're not asking people to do anything that you're not more than capable of doing yourself. I've also just had a front-row seat on the city now for decades, and so I'm something of an institutional...