Olivia Ruth Messer

Messer is the founding editor of next generation Texas news site The Barbed Wire. Her work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Marie Claire, Slate, MSNBC, The 19th*, and The Daily Beast, as well as numerous Texas publications. Her year-long investigation into sexual harassment in the state senate for Texas Monthly was a finalist in the civic journalism and reporting categories at the 40th Annual National City and Regional Magazine Awards. She has contributed editing and fact-checking to New York Times-bestselling book projects and reported groundbreaking investigations that sparked concrete policy changes; she was the first reporter to name the identity of the Golden State Killer in 2018. Under her helm, The Barbed Wire was a finalist for the 2025 Austin A-LIST Awards in the Creative & Digital Media Disruptor category, which “recognizes a startup or scale-up pushing the boundaries of creativity, storytelling, and audience engagement through digital media.” In 2026, she was named an Austin Under 40 finalist for Journalist of the Year.

During her five years at The Daily Beast, she wrote for its marquee product “The Cheat Sheet,” winning Best Email Newsletter at the 2018 Digiday Publishing Awards. For two years, she was a crime reporter for The Waco Tribune-Herald, where her work on the 2015 biker shooting won First Place in Deadline Writing at the Texas Managing Editors Excellence in Journalism Awards. She was later featured in the VICE docuseries “United Gangs of America” for her coverage of the Bandidos. Her debut novel, “Something’s Wrong With the Girls,” will be published by Rare Bird.

Read her work; follow her @oliviamesser; or send her an email to oliviamesser (at) protonmail (dot) com.