It was late August 2023, and the executives at The Texas Tribune had assembled their staff for a town hall. The day before, for the first time in the organization’s fourteen-year history, the nonprofit newsroom had laid off employees—eleven in total—including all the copy editors, as well as several well-respected reporters on the criminal justice and demographic beats. The staff was angry, peppering the Tribune’s CEO, then–editor in chief, and chief revenue officer with a barrage of questions. The problem, the leaders explained to staff, stemmed in part from a sort of branding crisis. Corporate and government sponsors were squeamish about associating with the Tribune’s aggressive coverage of uncomfortable subjects—the Uvalde school shooting, attacks by state leaders on trans children. And there was another problem:…