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On April Fool’s Day, The Austin Bulldog — the first hyper-local, digital only, non-profit news organization in Texas — will celebrate 16 years of being a thorn in the sides of local politicians and government agencies.
“At the time, the question was, what’s a good time to launch?” Bulldog founder Ken Martin recalled. This was in February 2010. “The Ides of March did not seem appropriate. So, I launched it on April Fool’s Day, 2010. The way I finessed it was, we don’t take ourselves too seriously, but we take our reporting very seriously.”
Watchdog is born
From the beginning, Martin, a scrappy, long-time Austin news veteran, intended The Bulldog to focus on what he calls “watchdog journalism.”
“Watchdog journalism is looking for anything that might have indications of criminality,” he told the Austin Free Press in a recent interview. “You’re looking for gross ineptitude. If you’re covering government, you’re looking to hold elected officials and the paid people accountable. Are they doing their jobs? Are they violating the law? Are they acting ethically?”
Martin launched that one-man operation with a bang: an in-depth report revealing that a member of the Georgetown city council received $13,600 in improper reimbursements.
The Bulldog followed that story with a flurry of investigative reports on how the city of Georgetown failed to adhere to the Texas Open Meetings Act in hiring a new city attorney. He then broke a major story about how the Austin mayor and council members for years convened an organized system of private meetings, or so-called walking quorums, right before every council meeting.
The day that story broke, the Travis County Attorney launched an inquiry into whether this longstanding practice of deliberating in private violated the Texas Open Meetings Act. It did.
“My favorite stories are the ones that take out the bad guys,” he said. “Those are the stories I enjoy. Finding a bad actor and then just putting it out there and letting the law take its course.”
Armed with a $25,000 New Voices grant from the Knight Foundation, a spanking new 501(c)3 IRS nonprofit designation, and a reputation for hard-nosed journalism, Martin launched The Bulldog a few months after The Texas Tribune, another Austin-based non-profit newsroom, got its start. But where The Tribune began life with $1.75 million in grants and donations (an amount that rapidly grew to nearly $4 million), Martin started off on a shoestring.
“All that The Bulldog has accomplished in these 16 years has been done on a tiny annual budget,” Martin said. “In the best year of revenue, we hit $62,000, while in 10 of the 16 years we filed 990-N postcard tax returns, meaning our annual revenue was less than $50,000.”
“It’s amazing he’s been able to keep it going,” said former Travis County Judge Bill Aleshire, an attorney focused on governmental compliance with the state’s open meetings and public information acts.
“It’s not like there’s no cost to him at all. I believe he’s paid some reporters to help him. He’s had some benefactors and folks just to figure out how to help him. I’m proud of him for keeping it going, because it’s not that easy,” said Aleshire, who has represented The Bulldog in open records litigation.
“During my career at the Austin American-Statesman, I watched Ken break story after story with a fraction of the resources we had at the city daily,” said Alberta Phillips, Austin Free Press Executive Director and Editor-in-Chief. “Today, Ken’s coverage of issues regarding the Travis County Central Appraisal District is unsurpassed.”
Credit: Ken Martin
Investigative investment
“He is The Bulldog. You can’t really talk about one without talking about the other,” said Rebecca Melançon, Martin’s wife and longtime publishing partner. “Ken launched The Bulldog out of a desire to do deep investigative reporting, which he absolutely loves, and the recognition that nobody in Austin was doing that at the time.”
Few news organizations do good investigative reporting because it consumes a lot of time and resources, Melançon said.
“I’ve seen Ken work for months on a story that evaporates right in front of him,” she said. “It can happen. It’s not like covering a board and commission meeting. In some ways, I understand why more people don’t do it.”
“He is one of the most hardworking journalists you’ll ever meet,” said local journalist Jo Clifton. “His dedication is unsurpassed and he wants to get to the bottom of whatever he’s looking at.”
Clifton and Martin worked together at In Fact Weekly, a newsletter Martin ran from 1995-2000.
“It was a weekly and he used to fax it out to people,” she said. “I was just covering the planning commission, because he couldn’t go everywhere. After he took it daily, he was staying up till 5 o’clock in the morning to get it out. He talked me into buying it from him (in 2000). I’m not sure that was a good idea, but … I took it over, then I stayed up until 5 o’clock in the morning.”
“At the time, he covered boards and commissions and city hall and it was much more reporting and less investigative,” said Melançon. “It had its niche because often the city (council) would have a big issue come up and they would hold it until after say seven or eight o’clock at night, after all the Statesman reporters had gone home. Then they would talk and so, many times, Ken was the only reporter sitting there, so he got the story.”
A nose for news
“Ken has a really good bullshit detector,” said attorney Fred Lewis. “In my experience, a lot of the reporters in Austin — especially the ones that are new to town — don’t have a good enough context to have a good (expletive) detector.”
Lewis pointed to a 2017 series about Austin Central Health, the UT-Austin Dell Medical School and indigent health care.
“They claim they were providing healthcare to poor people but they had no records of it,” he said. “The money was being transferred from the Central Health to the UT medical school, but there were no records of providing it (indigent care). I knew that if they had no records, it’s because they were providing no care.”
Lewis added: “Ken has been on that story and has stuck with it. He’s seen through the smoke screens and the diversions. He really was a bulldog. He was a bulldog for the truth. And he really didn’t care where it led, unlike a lot of people, because this story did not make Austin look good.”
“He discovers stories and writes up stories and conducts investigations that traditional media are not doing,” Aleshire agreed. “If you want to see stories on topics — or angles in those topics — that you didn’t get from traditional media stories, you should read The Austin Bulldog.”
Martin is particularly proud of his Government Accountability Project (GAP), which lives on The Bulldog website and soon will be cloned to the Austin Free Press site.
“I spent nine months building (it) in 2023 before launching it for public use,” he explained. “It contains more than 400 documents totaling more than 8,300 pages of records. Local government agencies require officials to submit these documents but they do not publish them. So far, I’ve filed more than 200 public information requests to gather these documents.”
Phillips said Austin Free Press and the Bulldog are partnering to strengthen the GAP, expanding its public records database and increasing public access to records from more local governments.
“We’re working together to shine an even brighter light on local government accountability,” Phillips said, adding that, “the GAP is a key part of local watchdog reporting.”
Credit: Ken Martin
Bulldog longevity
Martin and Melançon moved to Arkansas for the climate about five years ago. “We lived on 38th street, catty-corner from the edge of the Hancock golf course for 31 years,” Martin said. “But Rebecca has never liked the heat.”
The move hasn’t stopped Martin’s investigative work. He’s currently laboring on a multi-part series. “I will keep doing this work as long as I’m able,” he said. “I work hard to stay able. I hope to be around for quite a while longer.”
“I don’t even believe in retirement. I could not be happier with my choice. I’m 86 years old. I’m just having a blast. I love this stuff,” Martin said. “It’s just about the most fun thing I could do with my clothes on.”
Ken Martin Career Highlights:
- Since 2010, The Austin Bulldog editor and publisher;
- 1998-2000, Texas Public Utility News editor;
- 1997-2009, The Good Life Magazine editor;
- 1995-2000, In Fact Weekly/Daily editor and publisher;
- 1989-1994, Austin Business Journal, investigative reporter then editor;
- 1986-1989, Williamson County Sun, county and politics editor;
- 1984-1985, Dripping Springs Dispatch editor;
- 1981-1984, Third Coast Magazine, associate editor.
