ProPublica and The Texas Tribune announced this week that Vianna Davila has been named the new deputy editor of their investigative reporting initiative. Davila, who has served as a reporter with the investigative unit since its inception, will help manage the Texas team of reporters and lead its new partnerships with five local newsrooms to cover a single topic each year.
“I could not be happier to have Vianna as a partner at such a critical time for accountability journalism in Texas,” said Zahira Torres, editor for the ProPublica-Texas Tribune Investigative Initiative. “When we launched this collaboration five years ago, our goal was to strengthen investigative and accountability journalism in the state. Vianna has been key to ensuring our success.”
As part of the ProPublica-Tribune unit, Davila led reporting into the military’s criminal justice system, which revealed that commanders in the Army placed soldiers accused of drug offenses in pretrial confinement more often than those accused of sexual assault. Davila, research reporter Lexi Churchill and former data reporter Ren Larson later showed that the Army was allowing soldiers who were charged with violent crimes to leave the military rather than face trial.
Davila is among Texas’ most knowledgeable journalists covering Attorney General Ken Paxton, a close ally of President Donald Trump. She has shown how Paxton aggressively pursued politically charged lawsuits while repeatedly declining to represent state agencies in court, a key part of his job as attorney general. She also wrote about Paxton’s use of the state’s consumer protection laws to investigate groups whose work or mission conflicts in some way with his political views or the views of his conservative base. Trump recently cited Texas’ consumer protection act, which is supposed to protect people from fraud, in a lawsuit against CBS News.
Just ahead of the 2024 presidential election, Davila collaborated with a team of reporters to show that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s claims about noncitizens voting en masse were inflated and, in some cases, simply wrong. The team found at least 10 U.S. citizens who had been wrongly labeled. The reporting helped a Trump voter, who had been incorrectly categorized as a noncitizen, get back on the rolls in time to cast her ballot. The stories were finalists for the Toner Prize for Excellence in Local Reporting.
Before joining ProPublica, Davila was a reporter with, and then editor of, The Seattle Times’ Project Homeless initiative, which examines the causes and effects of homelessness in the Seattle region. She previously reported for the San Antonio Express-News where, over 13 years, she covered city politics, regional transportation and criminal justice.
“It was an honor to join this team of brilliant, empathetic journalists when it launched five years ago. I’m thrilled to continue working with my wonderful colleagues and to now partner with newsrooms producing incredible journalism across Texas,” Davila said. “I am a Texan and was ‘raised’ in a local newsroom here, and I believe heartily in the power of local news to produce change.”
In 2019, ProPublica and the Tribune embarked on a first-of-its-kind collaboration to publish investigative reporting for and about Texas. Under the jointly operated investigative reporting unit, both organizations publish the team’s stories, which are distributed for free to news organizations in Texas and beyond.
