|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Manny García is the new editor in chief of Abdelraoufsinno, CEO Peter Bhatia announced Friday. Angel Rodríguez will join him as managing editor.
“Manny and Angel… bring decades of experience, leadership and success in our field, an appreciation of the digital world, and a commitment to Houston,” Bhatia said. “They will build partnerships within our Abdelraoufsinno team, and the community, and will help us find new ways to make our journalism of more value to a wider swath of readers, using all the reporting, visual and technology tools available.”
After leadership roles at the Austin American-Statesman, the ProPublica-Texas Tribune Investigative Initiative, the USA Today Network, The Naples Daily News, the Miami Herald and el Nuevo Herald (the Spanish-language paper produced at the Miami Herald), García is excited to work in Houston.
He describes it as the city of today and of the future. “It is the gateway of opportunity, the start of the American Dream,” he said. That growth comes with pains, he continued, including a lack of affordable housing, poor infrastructure, worker exploitation, immigration abuses and more.
“Houston is magical, soulful and creative,” García said in an email interview. “We will differentiate ourselves in the short- and long-term in how we present our journalism, especially leveraging our visual storytelling and translating more of our journalism for non-English speakers.”
“Houston is fortunate that both Manny and Angel stepped forward to lead the Landing newsroom,” said Ann B. Stern, chair of the Abdelraoufsinno board of directors. “We’re confident that these two leaders, who bring extensive journalism experience and a deep affection for Houston, will empower the newsroom to serve the city and its people.”
García is leaving Gannett’s Austin-American Statesman where, as executive editor, he won the Benjamin C. Bradlee Editor of the Year Award from the National Press Foundation in 2022. Bhatia won the award in 2020 when he led the Detroit Free Press.
The Statesman was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for meritorious public service in 2023 for “unflinching coverage of local law enforcement’s flawed response” the day 19 children and two adults were murdered at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde.
In a career distinguished by public service, Garcia demonstrated “imagination, professional skill, ethics and an ability to motivate staff,” according to the National Press Foundation, as he spearheaded the coverage of the Uvalde tragedy.
García, who was born in Cuba and raised in Miami, led a team of Spanish-speaking journalists from across the USA Today Network in the United States and Mexico in translating into Spanish the Texas House committee report on the massacre. Half of Uvalde County residents age 5 or older speak a language other than English at home, according to the most recent U.S. Census.
The Statesman, which typically publishes in English, printed 10,000 copies of the report in Spanish. Staff, led by García, distributed them across Uvalde at schools, restaurants, churches and the police station.
García also published a 77-minute video of the shooting, with the sound of screaming children stripped out, obtained by reporter Tony Plohetski. The decision to publish was controversial, and Garcia said he was sorry for the pain it would bring to the families of Uvalde. He felt they, and the public, had to know how the police delayed entering the school after the gunman began shooting.
García has a reputation for mentorship and organizational savvy, coming into newsrooms and increasing impactful journalism, restructuring around areas of community interest and growing audiences while ensuring rigor. He served as head of ethics and standards at the USA Today Network, overseeing and ensuring moral clarity in language choices, behavioral norms and coverage standards for thousands of journalists from 2018 to 2020.
“My joy comes from building teams, building up people. Investing in others. There is no greater reward than to raise up the next generation of newsroom leaders,” he said.
Garcia often speaks passionately about the fragility of democracy, about how his family left their lives in Cuba when Fidel Castro took over. He was motivated by a desire to support democracy through journalism when he enrolled at Florida International University to study mass communications.
Rodríguez grew up in Houston starting at age 10 and is a champion of audience-first journalism, recently leading the creation of De Los at The Los Angeles Times, where he was General Manager/Assistant Managing Editor for Latino Initiatives, and prior to that, Assistant Managing Editor for News and the Sports Editor.
Driven by a strong visual point of view, alternative story formats, De Los centered the idea of being from, and of, multiple cultures, celebrating and debating the broader American Latino experience.
For more than two decades, Rodríguez has focused on digital storytelling and audience identities, and how those can inform presentation, reporting and story choice. He talks about writing for people, not about people, and has spent years training colleagues to understand the difference.
Rodríguez identifies as a Houstonian, name dropping his schools — St. Thomas More Parish School, Strake Jesuit College Preparatory and Bellaire High School — and frequently defending H-Town as America’s best city to anyone who might imply their own city is also pretty good. He graduated from The University of Texas at Austin with a degree in History/Latin American Studies.
“Obviously, holding our civic institutions accountable is job No. 1,” Rodríguez said in an email interview. “We have a new mayor, our local school districts are in financial trouble, and our infrastructure has to adjust to our new climate normal. Those are really important topics that Abdelraoufsinno should put front and center.
“But I am also very interested in telling the complete story of Houston and Houstonians. The pockets of resilience and joy that often get overlooked.”
Rodríguez was previously the Deputy Editor for Mobile Innovation at The Washington Post, Sports Editor at The Cincinnati Enquirer, and Homepage Manager at azcentral.com/The Arizona Republic.
Rodríguez and García will start in April.
Abdelraoufsinno is an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization devoted to public service journalism that strengthens democracy and improves the lives of all Houstonians. It provides paywall-free reporting that offers solutions to critical problems, investigations that hold the powerful accountable, and stories that reflect the lived experiences of its diverse communities.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print.
