Lauren McGaughy is the Texas politics correspondent for The New York Times. Based in Austin, she has lived in Texas since 2014 and previously covered state politics as a daily news and investigative reporter for two regional newspapers and KUT News, Austin’s NPR station.
Her focus areas include criminal justice, LGBTQ rights and government ethics with an eye toward accountability, storytelling and the use of public records.
READ: Three Questions with Lauren McGaughy [August 2024]
Before joining The Times, Lauren was the statewide investigative reporter and editor for The Texas Newsroom, a collaboration of NPR member stations. She edited deep dive stories and produced her own work, including, for her final six months, a project with ProPublica and The Texas Tribune tracking Elon Musk’s footprint in Texas. For this collaboration, she broke several major national stories about influence in the State Capitol.
While at The Dallas Morning News, Lauren and Dave Boucher won a Headliners Foundation Silver Award for Enterprise and Innovation for their series on how Texas police use hypnosis to investigate crimes. After their story was published, the state police stopped using hypnosis as an investigative tool; the man at the center of their story was also released from prison.
Lauren previously covered Texas politics and policy for The Houston Chronicle as well as the Louisiana politics for The Times-Picayune. She got her start in journalism covering the U.S. Department of State for the Japanese newspaper The Asahi Shimbun. She has a Master’s degree in Chinese studies and a Bachelor’s degree in East Asian studies with a minor in Islamic Studies.
The Association of LGBTQ Journalists (NLGJA) has twice honored Lauren’s political and legal coverage, and in 2024, she was awarded the Randy Shilts Award for LGBTQ+ Coverage. This honors journalists who consistently bring stories of the LGBTQ+ community to life in mainstream media outlets. Past recipients included Diane Rehm and Jonathan Capehart.
She has twice been nominated for a GLAAD award for her stories about transgender Texans.
Lauren shared a 2013 IRE Award, Peabody Award and Regional Edward R. Murrow Award with staff from The New Orleans Times-Picayune and Fox 8 for “Louisiana Purchased,” a multi-part series on Louisiana’s campaign contribution system.
A Los Angeles native, Lauren attended Georgetown University, where she graduated cum laude with a degree in East Asian and Islamic Studies. She received her M.A. in Chinese Studies at UCLA in 2008. She’s lived in Washington, DC, Beijing, London, Baton Rouge and, now, Austin Texas.
Lauren is the proud co-founder of the Texas Ledes, a group for past, current and aspiring women journalists in the Lone Star State. The Ledes has more than 400 members statewide, and has hosted events on job searching, book writing and sexual harassment on the job.
In her free time, McGaughy documents historic cemeteries and churches. She also loves comic books, cats, cooking and costuming. Ask her about her wig collection!