Austin, Texas · About austin-texas.news

About this paper

A participatory local paper

austin-texas.news is a free local newsletter about one thing: what's actually changing at the addresses around you in Austin. It goes out three mornings a week — Monday, Wednesday, Friday — and it's built on a plain observation. The facts that reshape a street are almost always public record long before they're a headline: a permit filed, a zoning case opened, a road closure posted, a business that just signed a lease. They're just scattered across a dozen city systems, written in code, and weeks ahead of anyone noticing the fence go up. This paper gathers them and puts them in front of the people who live at those addresses.

"Participatory" isn't a slogan here — it's how the paper is fed. Readers see the fence, the crew, the new sign, the torn-down thing before any dataset does. So the paper is open at both ends: you can send a tip about what's changing on your block, and a real person checks anything we use against the public record before it appears anywhere. You help point at what matters; we do the verifying and the sourcing. Nobody's name is ever attached to a tip.

What this is not

This is a newsletter, not a database of people. We write about places — a permit, a corner, a count, a closure — never about who lives at an address. We don't publish residents' names, don't run lookups from a name to an address, and don't connect anything here to people-search sources. The address-level property data itself lives on a separate site, austin-tx.us, and even there it's about property records, not people. If you're looking for "who lives here," this is the wrong paper, on purpose.

The two voices, and why we tell you they're not real reporters

Every edition is narrated by two recurring editorial personas — Zilker and Rainey — and we want to be completely plain about what they are, because a paper that isn't honest about its own byline has no business asking you to trust its facts.

Zilker is the Old-Austin voice: someone who's watched a neighborhood change for fifteen years, gets everywhere by bike, and is more interested in what a corner used to be than in selling you on what it is now. Zilker writes Zilker's Ramble — the first-person, block-by-block dispatch.

Rainey is the New-Austin voice: moved here for a job, stayed for the equity, reads zoning agendas for fun. Rainey writes Rainey's Data Corner — permits, cases, and closures, straight from the City's open data.

Neither of them is a person. Zilker and Rainey are editorial personas built for this paper with AI — consistent characters that give the newsletter a steady voice, not staff reporters you could call or look up. We chose to run them as named, transparent characters rather than invent fake human bylines precisely because the alternative — pretending an AI dispatch was written by a real named journalist — would be the dishonest version. Everything the two of them point you to is real: the news stories are reported by real outlets and credited to them; the permit, zoning, and closure numbers come straight from named public datasets with a retrieval date. The facts are the record. The two voices telling you about them are a device we're naming out loud.

Wherever Zilker or Rainey appear with a voice or a bio — here, in the newsletter, in the welcome email — that transparency note travels with them. It's never fine print.

Who runs this

austin-texas.news is an independent newsletter operated by EZOSHosting (ezoshosting.com), based at 2215 Post Road #1112, Austin, TX 78704. Person responsible for content: Sascha Endlicher. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by the City of Austin, Travis County, or any government agency; for official information, go to austintexas.gov.

Reach us any time at howdy@austin-tx.us. Full legal and contact details are on our Legal Notice page; how we handle your email is on our Privacy Policy.

An independent newsletter by EZOSHosting, Austin, TX. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by the City of Austin or Travis County. Official information: austintexas.gov.