For the people.
With the people.
Our nonprofit journalism amplifies voices in disinvested Dallas neighborhoods and explores solutions to our city’s systemic inequities.
Award-winning journalist Keri Mitchell, who spent 15 years dedicated to community and civic journalism at Dallas’ Advocate magazines, launched Dallas Free Press in early 2020 with the belief that all neighborhoods deserve reporting and storytelling that values their community and holds leaders accountable.
Dallas Free Press was named 2021’s “New Publisher of the Year” by Local Independent Online News (LION) Publishers for “being truly rooted in community and public service … starting from a place of community listening, meeting real information needs, and centering equity.” We focus community journalism efforts in South Dallas and West Dallas, two of our city’s historically redlined neighborhoods, and that work informs collaborative projects to tackle complex civic issues with solutions journalism.
Traditional news business models prevent this, however. The problem with an advertising-based model is that reporting and storytelling are limited to communities where advertisers want to spend money to reach the wealthiest residents of the city. Subscription models face a similar dilemma; content is catered to people willing to pay for subscriptions.
A nonprofit model allows for a return to journalism for its intended purpose — public service. The focus of Dallas Free Press is to focus community journalism efforts in Dallas “news deserts,” starting with South Dallas and West Dallas, and also to build a local journalism collaborative to tackle complex civic issues.
- What’s a “news desert”? View the definition alongside Dallas delivery maps.
- What kind of content do we publish? Are we looking for staff and freelancers? Find out how we define and produce our journalism.
Jump to:
Staff
Business Structure
Board of Directors
Media Partners
Community Allies
Actionable Feedback
Editorial Independence Policy
Editorial Priorities
Diverse Voices Policy
Diverse Staffing Report
Racial Equity Policy
Fact-Checking Policy
Corrections Policy
Reporting Methods and Story References
Unnamed Sources Policy
Privacy Policy
About ‘The Trust Project’
Our Team
Staff
Keri Mitchell
Founder + executive director
LinkedIn Twitter
Contact: keri@dallasfreepress.com
Read Keri’s Dallas Free Press stories
Keri Mitchell has spent 20+ years as a community journalist, including 15 years dedicated to community and civic journalism at Dallas’ Advocate magazines. She launched Dallas Free Press in early 2020 with the belief that all neighborhoods deserve reporting and storytelling that values their community and holds leaders accountable.
Mitchell says she is energized by “knowing our work is making an impact — listening to people, telling their stories with strong narratives paired with compelling data that leads to change. I also love spending time in our neighborhoods and with our neighbors, learning from them and working to determine how journalism can be part of the solution to their challenges.”
Mitchell is proud to be the winner of multiple awards during her journalism career including: Finalist in Magazine Feature Reporting (2018) and Finalist in Magazine Investigative Reporting (2017) from Hugh Aynesworth Excellence in Journalism, Best Feature Story (2011) from Texas Community Newspaper Association and Best Magazine Feature (2011) from Dallas Bar Association Philbin Awards.
Sujata Dand
Senior Editor and Reporter
LinkedIn
Contact: sujata@dallasfreepress.com
Read Sujata’s Dallas Free Press stories
Sujata Dand is an award-winning journalist who is energized by change brought in communities in response to news stories. She lives in and has spent most of her reporting career in Dallas, with ample experience covering health care, education and public policy.
“I think it’s important to elevate voices that are often ignored,” Dand says. “For me, that means meeting the people in our communities. We need to see people and listen to them. It’s often a huge act of courage for people to openly share their lives. So, I feel an enormous responsibility in making sure my stories are authentic and fair.”
Dand worked at KERA for almost 10 years, where she produced several television documentaries, including “Life in the Balance: The Health Care Crisis in Texas” and “High School: The Best and the Rest.” She also headed the multimedia project “Boyfriends,” which examined the complex personal and cultural factors that contribute to the way adolescent girls form and maintain relationships. Her work has garnered several local Emmys and national awards including a Gracie for best reality program.
Prior to her work with KERA, Sujata was a reporter and anchor at the CBS affiliate in Wichita Falls, Texas. She has worked as a freelance reporter for NPR and Dallas Morning News. Dand is a graduate of Trinity University in San Antonio.
Jeffrey Ruiz
Report for America Corps Member
LinkedIn
Contact: jeffrey@dallasfreepress.com
Languages: English and Spanish
Read Jeffrey’s Dallas Free Press stories
Jeffrey Ruiz is a Dallas native who focuses on government accountability in his South Dallas and West Dallas reporting as a Report for America corps member. His journalist expertise lies in covering immigrants, the transgender community, the Latino community, poverty and the unhoused. He also enjoys diving into religion and its influence in the community.
When asked why Ruiz chose to write for Dallas Free Press, he says, “Being a part of a local newsroom that serves the community in any way possible with the readers’ best interest in mind is where I always dreamed of being a journalist. I look forward to the day I start writing news stories in Spanish to be translated into English.”
When Ruiz needs a break, you can find him enjoying lunch at his favorite go-to spots: La Tacotrona and Locura Small Bites.
Sona Chaudhary
Environmental Justice Freelance Reporter
LinkedIn
Contact: sona@dallasfreepress.com
Read Sona’s Dallas Free Press stories
Sona Chaudhary is a Dallas-based geologist, writer and journalist working on environmental justice issues in Dallas and throughout the Southwest United States.
“I want to be involved in Dallas, and I want to help make it better,” Chaudhary says. “I think Dallas Free Press is the greatest learning opportunity there could be, amplifying the voices of people involved in some radical, empathetic and transformative work on the local level.”
In addition to writing for environmental change, Chaudhary is a physical scientist at the Environmental Protection Agency. They are a Cancer Sun, Aries Moon fueled by chai tea.
Business Structure
Dallas Free Press is a 501(c)3 nonprofit, EIN 20-5245262 (legal name Advocate Foundation Inc., dba Dallas Free Press). View our Guidestar profile.
Prior to 2020, what is now Dallas Free Press was Advocate magazines’ charitable arm, Advocate Foundation Inc, which was founded in 2007 to provide small grants to neighborhood businesses and schools. The Great Recession of 2008 and the simultaneous internet revolution rendered the foundation dormant by 2015, so Advocate founder Rick Wamre handed the reins over to Keri Mitchell, who revamped it as a standalone news nonprofit.
In 2020 we filed a legal DBA certificate for Dallas Free Press and changed the function of the nonprofit to produce journalism rather than distribute grants. Advocate Media has since switched from a for-profit to a non-profit newsroom as well. The two nonprofit newsrooms still are mutual advisors on community and civic journalism projects, but are no longer connected in terms of finances or business practices.
Board of Directors
Chair: John Hill | LinkedIn
Vice-Chair: Alex Enriquez | LinkedIn
Secretary: Angela Downes | LinkedIn
Treasurer: Lucy Huang | LinkedIn
To contact any board member, email board@dallasfreepress.com.
Media Partners
Dallas Free Press’ collaborative partners include:
• Dallas Weekly, a trusted news source for the city’s African-American audiences with a legacy that reaches back into the Civil Rights Era. Our two newsrooms share and collaborate on content that addresses issues where our two audiences overlap, and we also join forces on community events.
• The six newsrooms and three journalism schools in the Dallas Media Collaborative, primarily focused on affordable housing. Reporters and editors from partner newsrooms share and collaborate on content, using the four pillars identified by the Solutions Journalism Network, to tackle complex civic issues together for the good of Dallas.
• City Bureau, a groundbreaking local newsroom birthed in Chicago’s South Side, who leads us and eight other local newsrooms in the Documenters Network in the work to train and pay Dallas residents to attend and take notes at local public meetings. Dallas Free Press joined the network in early 2023 to involve Dallas residents directly in the public processes that impact their daily lives, and to build a robust public record that holds people in power accountable.
Community Allies
Are you interested in becoming a Dallas Free Press organization, communication, civic or space partner? Please reach out to Gloria Ardilla, gloria@dallasfreepress.com.
Actionable Feedback
South Dallas and West Dallas residents are a frontline witness to life in our neighborhoods — local governance, public safety, schools, housing, social movements, culture — and our neighbors’ insights shape our news agenda. We invite your comments and complaints on news stories, suggestions for issues to cover or sources to consult, and your participation in both the Public Newsroom events we host for you and the community meetings and gatherings we attend along with you. We believe that journalism is a public good that should directly involve the people it serves.
As a newsroom committed to delivering quality news to our West Dallas and South Dallas communities, we invite feedback in any form — corrections, praise or general thoughts. Our neighbors and readers are welcome to contact us here.
Our team engages with our neighbors on a daily basis, both in-person and digitally. We also host regular Public Newsroom gatherings and make the rounds to neighborhood events with our Pop-Up Newsroom.
Here are ways to engage with us:
Two-Way Texting
Dallas Documenters
Journalism Pathway
Pop-Up Newsroom
Public Newsroom
Community Gatherings
South Dallas Office
Neighbors on Our Team
Newsletters in Your Inbox
Our Policies
Editorial Independence Policy
We subscribe to standards of editorial independence adopted by the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN).
Our organization retains full authority over editorial content to protect the best journalistic and business interests of our organization. We maintain a firewall between news coverage decisions and sources of all revenue. Acceptance of financial support does not constitute implied or actual endorsement of donors or their products, services or opinions.
We accept gifts, grants and sponsorships from individuals and organizations for the general support of our activities, but our news judgments are made independently and not on the basis of donor support.
Our organization may consider donations to support the coverage of particular topics, but our organization maintains editorial control of the coverage. We will cede no right of review or influence of editorial content, nor of unauthorized distribution of editorial content.
Our organization will make public all donors who give a total of $5,000 or more per year. We will accept anonymous donations for general support only if it is clear that sufficient safeguards have been put into place that the expenditure of that donation is made independently by our organization and in compliance with INN’s Membership Standards.
Editorial Priorities
As a nonprofit news organization, Dallas Free Press is strictly nonpartisan, but we aren’t completely objective. We are unabashedly biased toward the two neighborhoods we cover — South Dallas and West Dallas — and the voices of the people who live in them.
Our editorial strategy centers around our bias and our commitment to community, civic, solutions and movement journalism:
We spend a lot of time in our neighborhoods, listening to residents and asking them how journalism can do better. Here is a snapshot of what we learned from our neighbors in 2021.
Through our ongoing listening process, we’ve created priority issues and topics of most importance to South Dallas and West Dallas neighbors, which drive our editorial decisions and our content choices:
- Community assets: Too many stories told about South Dallas and West Dallas focus on crime and blight. We’re not going to sugarcoat the problems, but we want to highlight the good news that doesn’t receive enough coverage.
- Follow-ups: What our neighbors appreciate most from us is not just the big announcements but paying attention to what happens next — whether promises made were kept, whether big initiatives that launched made any difference, whether the people a program intended to help actually benefited.
- Civic explainers: We know you’re tired of the he-said, she-said political stories. We are, too. We subscribe to the citizen’s agenda, and we’ll create content t