The Texas Tribune has added some new faces to our roster who will be digging deep and investigating some of the state’s most urgent and interesting storylines.
Taylor Goldenstein joined us last week as our newest enterprise and investigative reporter. Taylor previously spent seven years at the Houston Chronicle as a state politics reporter, where she demonstrated a passion for holding political officials to account. Over nearly a decade covering Attorney General Ken Paxton, Taylor’s reporting revealed disparities between the taxpayer dollars spent on highly politicized voter fraud and human trafficking units and their actual productivity. She also exposed Paxton’s yearslong failure to enforce late campaign finance fines, as well as the ethical concerns surrounding his office’s oversight of those fines after he himself became delinquent.
She hails from the suburbs of Chicago and graduated with a journalism degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2014, she was a visiting fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Taylor’s grandparents immigrated to the U.S. from Latin America, providing a foundation in Spanish that she has strengthened through more than a decade of formal study and an undergraduate minor in the language.
Taylor joins Lomi Kriel, who started with the team in late 2025. Previously, Lomi — a two-time Pulitzer finalist — was a founding member of the Tribune’s investigative team with ProPublica. In that role, Lomi was one of the lead reporters of the newsroom partnership’s award-winning reporting investigating law enforcement’s failures to respond to the Uvalde school shooting. Lomi also was recognized with the George Polk Award for her reporting at the Houston Chronicle revealing Trump’s family separation policy during the first administration.
Lomi, who was born and raised in South Africa, immigrated to the United States in 1998. She has worked as a Central American correspondent for Thomson Reuters and a criminal justice reporter for the San Antonio Express-News, among other publications. Lomi is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin and Columbia University and speaks Afrikaans and Spanish.
The Tribune created a team of investigative reporters housed entirely in our newsroom last year as part of an effort to bolster the depth and impact of our coverage of state government and its impact on Texans’ lives. It’s designed to hold our leader accountable and grapple with the biggest issues facing our state, and it’s led by Rebekah Allen, managing editor of politics and enterprise, who has overseen some of the Tribune’s most ambitious reporting efforts in recent years and previously served as politics editor. The unit is in addition to our joint newsroom with ProPublica, which was formed in 2019 and has produced award-winning journalism that appears in both publications.
We’re thrilled to have these two new reporters onboard and looking forward to their coverage this year on topics like the proliferation of data centers in the state and conditions at ICE detention facilities.
