About MySA

MySA

MySA, published at MySanAntonio.com, is Hearst's free local news website for San Antonio, Texas. Hearst describes it as the city's top local news site, serving the community and surrounding areas of southeastern Texas with daily news on local life, food, pop culture, the San Antonio Spurs, local television personalities, politics, real estate and weather. Hearst has reported that the site reaches more than five million unique visitors a month. Unlike its sister publication, the San Antonio Express-News, whose premium site ExpressNews.com carries investigative and subscription content, MySA is paywall-free and built for a broad, search- and social-driven audience looking for what is happening in San Antonio right now.

Location and Coverage Area

MySA is based in San Antonio, in Bexar County in south-central Texas. San Antonio is one of the largest cities in Texas and the United States, a majority-Hispanic major city and home to several major military installations, a fact that shapes much of the site's coverage, from military homecomings to the families stationed in the area. Hearst notes that the Express-News and its sister site together reach a community of more than two million people in the San Antonio area. MySA's coverage extends beyond the city limits into the surrounding communities of southeastern Texas, following the interests of readers across the wider San Antonio metropolitan area.

Origins as a Newspaper and Television Portal

MySA began not as a standalone newsroom but as a joint regional portal. Trade publication Editor & Publisher reported that Hearst Newspapers' San Antonio Express-News and Belo-owned television station KENS 5 launched My San Antonio at mysanantonio.com in December 1999, with the new portal replacing the Express-News's existing website. The launch carried a subhead crediting both partners, with most day-to-day news content coming from the newspaper and KENS 5 supplying late-breaking coverage. The portal's first day, Monday, December 6, was troubled by a technical fault that looped many visitors back to the home page, a problem the paper said had eased by the following day. Express-News publisher Larry Walker presented the portal strategy at the time as a way for established local media to compete with national internet portals by joining forces.

Ownership by Hearst

MySA's newspaper parent has belonged to Hearst since the early 1990s. Hearst acquired the Express-News from Rupert Murdoch's News Corp in a deal announced in 1992, and closed its own competing San Antonio Light in January 1993 after the Light failed to find a buyer. The Express-News itself traces its roots to 1865, when it first appeared as a weekly called the San Antonio Express, becoming a daily in December 1866. Under Hearst, the combined Express-News became San Antonio's leading newspaper, and its digital operations grew into two distinct brands: ExpressNews.com for the newspaper's premium journalism and MySanAntonio.com for the free, high-reach local site.

A Separate Newsroom from the Express-News

The defining structural fact about MySA is its editorial independence from its sister paper. Hearst states plainly that while it owns both ExpressNews.com and MySanAntonio.com, the two publications maintain separate newsrooms and are editorially independent of one another. The two operations have shared office space, but MySA's staff produces its own stories, chooses its own angles and publishes on its own schedule rather than simply republishing the newspaper. The batch description for this profile likewise notes that MySA became an independent site with its own newsroom, separate from the Express-News. That separation explains the difference in tone between the two sites: the Express-News carries the paper's investigative and enterprise reporting, while MySA concentrates on fast, accessible coverage of daily life in the city.

What MySA Covers

Hearst's own summary of MySA lists its core subjects: food, puro pop culture, the San Antonio Spurs, local TV personalities, politics, real estate and weather, alongside general local news. In practice that means restaurant openings and taco coverage, guides to things to do, Texas culture stories with statewide reach, Spurs news for one of the NBA's most devoted local fan bases, and practical service coverage such as weather and real estate. The phrase "puro" — a distinctly San Antonio piece of local slang celebrating the city's homegrown culture — captures the site's editorial identity: it writes about San Antonio the way San Antonians talk about it, and its culture coverage frequently travels well beyond Texas because so much of it taps into food, music and traditions with national followings.

Growth, Relaunches and Network Membership

MySA was an early participant in the first generation of American local-news portals. In its partnership years it joined the Real Cities Network, the Knight Ridder Digital network of local sites, alongside other Texas sites such as Houston's Chron.com and Fort Worth's Star-Telegram.com; the network announcement credited MySanAntonio.com with reaching 1.29 million monthly unique visitors and nearly 40 percent of local adults in its market. The site was later relaunched with reader comments, user uploads and community sections organized around interests such as moms, pets, health and hunting and fishing — an early attempt to build online community around a local news brand. Local recognition followed: San Antonio Current readers voted MySanAntonio.com the city's best website in the paper's 2005 Best of SA readers' poll.

Audience and Reach

Hearst's current brand page for MySA reports more than five million unique visitors monthly, a figure far larger than the San Antonio market alone, reflecting how much of the site's food, culture and Texas news coverage draws a national audience through search and social sharing. Earlier Hearst figures, drawn from Scarborough research for 2020, credited the Express-News print products and MySanAntonio.com together with reaching more than 837,100 adults in the San Antonio designated market area each week. The site's military coverage has long been aimed at a worldwide audience as well: a relaunch-era statement from its general manager noted that San Antonio's military influence touches people stationed and trained around the world, and positioned the site as the place for that dispersed community to stay connected to the city.

Relationship with KENS 5 and the Portal Era

MySA's founding partnership with KENS 5 is a well-documented example of the media-convergence era, when newspapers and television stations in the same market combined their websites. KENS, San Antonio's CBS affiliate, was itself originally tied to the Express-News — its call letters stood for Express-News Stations — before passing to other owners. San Antonio Current media criticism from that period used MySanAntonio.com as its local example of convergence, noting that stories produced for the newspaper could appear on the portal and be used by the station. Over time the portal model faded, KENS moved to its own digital home, and MySA evolved into a Hearst-run newsroom in its own right rather than a joint front door for two companies.

MySA Today

Today MySA operates as San Antonio's free, high-volume Hearst news site, publishing throughout the day from its own newsroom while its sister Express-News focuses on premium and print journalism. It remains part of Hearst Newspapers' Texas footprint alongside the Houston Chronicle and Chron.com, a pairing that has often seen the two metros' digital sites share coverage of statewide stories. For readers, the distinction Hearst maintains is simple and deliberate: ExpressNews.com is the newspaper online, and MySA is the city's open front page — its food scene, its Spurs, its weather, its neighborhoods and its puro culture, written by a separate team for the widest possible audience.