Olivia Messer is an independent investigative journalist; thanks to a grant from the Fund For Investigative Journalism, she is currently reporting on sexual misconduct under contract for Texas Monthly. Messer was the founding editor of next generation Texas news site The Barbed Wire, which she ran for two years. She consults on investigative editing, trauma reporting, building startups, how to create editorial products (including newsletters), and how to grow and sustain audience engagement. Messer’s writing has appeared in Rolling Stone, Marie Claire, Slate, and The Daily Beast, as well as numerous Texas publications. In 2024, 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 also contributed editing and fact-checking work to New York Times-bestselling book projects; completed groundbreaking investigative reports on crime and politics; written first-person essays on murder and sexual-assault; and she was the first reporter to name the identity of the Golden State Killer. Under her leadership, The Barbed Wire was named a finalist for the 2025 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, entertainment, gaming, or immersive experiences.” In 2026, she was named an Austin Under 40 finalist for Journalist of the Year.

Elizabeth Spiers — The New York Times essayist who founded Gawker’s famously biting editorial voice — once dubbed her “goth Nora Ephron.” Tina Brown, the former editor in chief of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker who founded The Daily Beast, has called her “meticulous.”

During her 5+ years at the Beast, she was a national reporter at the height of the pandemic, where she covered #MeToo extensively and wrote for its marquee product “The Cheat Sheet,” winning Best Email Newsletter at the 2018 Digiday Publishing Awards. Her reported essay on trauma in journalism led to concrete impact in national newsrooms, including The San Francisco Chronicle’s hiring of an in-house therapist. 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 on X, Instagram or Threads @oliviamesser; or send her an email to oliviamesser (at) protonmail (dot) com.