Read the people who cover this every day
This chapter is not a newspaper and does not want to be one. It files records requests and keeps an archive. The daily work of covering Abilene is done by the newsrooms below, several of them nonprofit and under-funded, and the single most useful thing a reader can do is subscribe to one.
Covering Abilene and Texas
Links only. Nothing on this page is republished, excerpted or summarised.
Abilene Reporter-News
The local daily.
KTXS
Local broadcast news.
The Texas Tribune
Nonprofit statewide newsroom; the best single source on Texas government.
Texas Comptroller transparency data
Not a newsroom — the state's own filings, useful for checking a story.
Why we link instead of republish
Local newsrooms are paid by attention. An aggregator that lifts a paragraph and keeps the reader on its own page takes that attention and gives nothing back, and then the newsroom shrinks and there is less reporting for everyone — including for us, because most of what a records request confirms was first noticed by a reporter.
So the rule here is absolute: link out, never republish. The only documents hosted on this site are public records, which belong to the public already.
If you are a reporter, a nonprofit or a resident group working on something here, the archive and the request pipeline are yours to use, and we will file on your behalf if a request under your own name would cost you something. Get in touch.