Reporting Texas
News and features from UT-Austin's School of Journalism
byMichael Nolan
Nestled deep in the Amazon basin, a makeshift house sits alongside a rustic nut storage facility. Two of the occupants of this house in Peru’s remote Madre de Dios District might be the last chance of survival for the endangered language Iñapari.
Meanwhile, over 3,000 miles away, a doctoral student is huddled over his laptop at the University of Texas at Austin. Barrett Hamp, a UT doctoral student in linguistics, has dedicated his research since 2019 to recording the indigenous language in Peru to prevent it from disappearing. “Once a language is gone, it’s gone. There’s no reviving it,” Hamp said.
byCorey Smith
The Broken Spoke faces a critical turning point this spring, as the Austin City Council considers designating the lot surrounding the Texas dance hall as a historic zone, a declaration that would protect the 58-year-old venue from real estate development along South Lamar Boulevard.
In November, the council initiated a proclamation naming the Broken Spoke a historical landmark. But that largely ceremonial proclamation, brought by Council Member Ann Kitchen, in itself does not ensure long-term preservation of the dance hall and restaurant. So, Kitchen initiated the city’s historic zoning process that would make it more difficult for the landowner to develop the Broken Spoke site.
“She didn’t want it to go the way of so many other historic landmarks unofficially named in town,” said the author of a 2017 book on the dance hall. “She wanted it to be here for future generations. So she started the process.”
byJames Grant, Travis Hlavinka, Lindsey Logan, Jennifer Martinez, Reagan Morrisey, Mildret Orellana, Tehya Rassman, Meredith Schmidt and Maya Vela
The COVID-19 pandemic changed the lives of millions of Americans, including the Spring 2020 students in J362F, Journalism Portfolio. As their final project, some students in one class selected different groups of people affected by quarantines and closures, to learn about their individual experiences of “Life in a Pandemic.” The following categories complete the phrase […]
byAlejandra Gavilanes and Sam Bellessa
UT students Alejandra Gavilanes and Sam Bellessa set out to discover one of Central Texas’ most popular events and along the way meet the king and his royal subjects at the Texas Renaissance Festival.