About Houston Heights Independent

We go. We see. We come back and tell you what's out there.

Houston Heights Independent is a civic journalism outlet built the way local news used to be built — from inside the neighborhood, not from a newsroom somewhere else looking in.

HHI was founded by Jim Towers, a retired Master Peace Officer with 35 years of law enforcement experience, a licensed Texas private investigator, a certified expert witness, and a criminal justice professor who has taught at eight colleges and universities. He has served as a law enforcement instructor at six regional police academies, taught at the federal law enforcement training centers in Glencoe, Georgia, and Cheltenham, Maryland, and the Director three police academies in Texas.

Why does he do this? He grew up here. He lived most of his life here, rode his bicycle to Hamilton Middle School, learned to drive on these streets, and went to high school here — back when it was Reagan High School, now Heights High School.

He was in the ROTC program there, and that program got him to the universities he went on to attend, where he completed an associate's, a bachelor's, a master's, and a doctorate. He came back and patrolled the streets of the Heights as a police officer for years, eventually becoming a supervisor in the district he grew up in.

He has also spent fifty years behind a camera, building an archive that runs from Heights front porches to Hill Country ranch roads to the wreckage of stories most people only read about after the fact. That archive — not a business plan — is where this publication started.

HHI operates on the Murrow standard: go to where the story is, see it firsthand, and come back and tell people what's actually there. No aggregation, no wire-service rewrites. If it runs in HHI, someone from HHI was there.

What we cover. The Heights, Woodland Heights, Norhill, Sunset Heights, Independent Heights, Henderson Heights, West Heights, Buffalo Heights, Brooke Smith, Shady Acres, and the neighborhoods that ring them — that's home base. But the reporting doesn't stop at a zip code line. When there's a story worth firsthand coverage, HHI follows it, whether that's a city investigation, a courtroom, or a highway shoulder outside Lockhart. Investigations, breaking news, neighborhood institutions, and the quieter stories about the people and places that make the Heights worth living in all run side by side here.

Who's behind it. HHI is a two-person newsroom with a very good dog. Jim Towers is Editor-in-Chief and photojournalist. His wife serves as Managing Editor and Director of Social Media, running distribution across every platform HHI publishes to. And Sergeant Major Murray — a basset hound named for Edward R. Murrow — holds down two columns: Murray on the Scent, his Houston-wide investigative beat, and Mr. Underwood, his Heights-specific column named for the neighborhood's historic Underwood telephone exchange, whose ghost still lives in every 86-prefix phone number in the neighborhood.

How we operate. HHI operates independently. It was never designed to make money or turn a profit — it doesn't have to, it doesn't need to, and it doesn't want to. HHI will accept advertising on a flat-fee basis, primarily to support local businesses across the Heights and the greater coverage area, but with one condition: zero editorial influence. Any advertiser who tries to shape coverage is removed immediately, no exceptions. Reporting here isn't for sale, and it never will be.

Why it matters. Local news has been disappearing from neighborhoods like this one for a generation. HHI exists to make sure the Heights still has someone showing up — at the city meeting, the crime scene, the fish fry, the demolition site — and coming back to tell you, honestly, what happened.

The night he decided to become a journalist. When he was working patrol as a probationary police officer in the Heights, he came across a group of newspaper reporters late one night, in the middle of something they had no business doing. The reporter he confronted turned, froze, then smiled — and while talking fast, walked the young officer by the elbow straight out of the building. The rookie was back outside before he realized what had happened. In that last second, the reporter looked back at him and grinned: "You got moxie, kid.! Moxie I say ! And I like it." Then he pressed a Houston Chronicle typesetting ruler into his hand — a yard-and-a-half strip of silver metal stamped "Miss Classified," dated 1990 — and said, "This is a little token of appreciation from me and the boys," before shutting the door.

That moment stayed with him. He watched the reporters slip out the back, pile into a van, and vanish into the night. Honestly, he wasn't sure what just happened. But in that instant, he knew. He wanted to be a journalist.

Jim Towers
Houston Heights Independent. We go. We see. We come back and tell you what's out there.
A promise from Dr. James Towers, Editor-in-Chief, Houston Heights Independent.

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It also feeds Murray.