What kinds of stories does Dallas Free Press cover?
Why and how we cover events and resources
Where exactly are South Dallas and West Dallas?
Why and how does Dallas Free Press exist?
Is this happening for us or to us?
How does Dallas Free Press earn trust?
What is trustworthy news?

What we do

What kinds of stories does Dallas Free Press cover?
Our communities deserve to know more than just what’s happening.

That’s an important role of journalism, of course, and it’s why Dallas Free Press has event calendars, resource maps, a text message service and other ways of letting South Dallas and West Dallas neighbors know what’s on the horizon. But even more important than what’s happening, we think, is why it matters and what happens next.

Newsrooms are fairly susceptible to bright shiny objects — press releases, media events, social media splashes. What we need to do better is keep paying attention. We’ve spent a lot of time in our neighborhoods over the past two years, listening to residents and asking them how journalism can do better. Through that, we’ve created priority issues and topics of most importance to South Dallas and West Dallas neighbors, which drive our editorial decisions.

We’ve been asked many times by our neighbors — “What happened?” What happened to that money? That program? That promise? How did it benefit us?

What our neighbors appreciate most from us is the follow-up — whether promises made were kept, whether big initiatives that launched made any difference, whether the people a program intended to help actually benefited.

Why and how we cover events and resources

Dallas Free Press aims to:
1) be a centralized, trusted source of information for events and resources that are designed for and benefit residents of our communities, and
2) consistently communicate these events and resources to neighbors.

We do this by adding events to our West Dallas and South Dallas event calendars each week, and resources to our West Dallas and South Dallas resource maps each month, and then disseminating them directly to neighbors via our weekly text message service and email newsletter.

Anyone is welcome to submit an event or a resource for publication on our website, but we do not publish all submissions. Learn more about what we publish by viewing our event calendars, our maps and these guidelines. Submit your events here and resources here.

We do not try to be a clearinghouse of every event and resource in greater Dallas, nor are we able to event promotion. If you are a business, nonprofit or government agency trying to reach our audiences, we encourage you to look into our digital sponsorship opportunities.

Where exactly are South Dallas and West Dallas?

We’re frequently asked some semblance of this question. Another version is: “How do you define South Dallas and West Dallas?”

The answer is that we at Dallas Free Press do not define West Dallas and South Dallas. Instead, we ask our neighbors how they define their neighborhood, and let that be our guide for our reporting and storytelling parameters.

Embed South Dallas map

South Dallas ≠ southern Dallas

The term “South Dallas” is often used (including by local media) to describe everything south of Downtown until you reach Duncanville. That’s actually “southern Dallas,” which we don’t capitalize because it refers to an area, not a self-defined community.

As we have learned over the years, neighbors generally define South Dallas/Fair Park as all of zip codes 75210 and 75215, and a small portion of 75223 (the Jubilee neighborhood) and 75226 (where Citysquare sits). It’s a 14-square-mile area immediately south of Downtown, but immediately north and northeast of Oak Cliff. The map above, from the South Dallas/Fair Park Area Plan task force, captures this definition.

“I think it’s always good to assume that if you cross a bridge from Downtown, you are in either Oak Cliff or West Dallas,” lifetime South Dallas resident Ken Smith told us when we asked for his definition. “Folks don’t use the terms ‘South Oak Cliff,’ ‘North Oak Cliff,’ or ‘West Oak Cliff’ enough. But, I think it is just downright wrong to say ‘South Dallas’ when referring to Red Bird Mall.”

Embed West Dallas map

West Dallas ≠ northwest Dallas

West Dallas neighbors define their community as south of the Trinity River and north of I-30, with Highway 12 creating the western border. Neighbors sometimes call it “the island” because of the hard borders created by a river and an interstate highway.

West Dallas encompasses almost the entirety of zip code 75212, with a tiny portion of 75208 jutting across I-30 on the eastern side. Neighborhood high school Dr. L.G. Pinkston is known by alumni as “the Pride of the West Side,” with its attendance boundaries overlapping pretty much all of West Dallas and extending south into Oak Cliff.

Neighborhood boundary disagreements

The complicated part is when neighbors disagree on the definition of where their neighborhood is.

Though there is general agreement on the definition of West Dallas, not everyone agrees on where Eagle Ford is in relation to Ledbetter, for example.

The Mill City neighborhood often is referred to as part of South Dallas/Fair Park, including in our coverage, like this piece on 50 new homes being constructed on vacant lots. But Antong Lucky of Urban Specialists, who is partnering with Matthews Southwest on the project, insists that Mill City, where he grew up, is in East Dallas.

”I had an argument with someone from the City who told me Spring Avenue is in South Dallas,” Lucky quipped at the groundbreaking ceremony.

So what do we do when there isn’t consensus?

Just keep listening and let neighbors tell their own stories about their communities. That’s the important thing.

Why we do it

Why and how does Dallas Free Press exist?

Dallas Free Press launched in early 2020 because we believe all neighborhoods deserve reporting and storytelling that values their community and holds leaders accountable.

The kind of journalism that creates community impact and encourages civic engagement is never about people; it’s for and with them. Listening to people in disinvested neighborhoods like South Dallas and West Dallas is crucial to our mission because that’s the only way to truly work toward solutions to Dallas’ most entrenched inequities.

Read our origin story by founder Keri Mitchell.

Is this happening for us or to us?

This is the foundational question underneath almost all of the questions and conversations we listen to in West Dallas and South Dallas. When something or someone appears on the scene, proposing to make a transformational difference, residents wonder — why are you really here? And who is this really for?

These are valid, understandable questions, given the history in West Dallas and South Dallas. And they are questions our journalists explore in pretty much every story.

Take, for instance, our recent piece on Watermark Community Church, which surprised South Dallas residents with its purchase of the historic Pearl C. Anderson school three years ago, and now wants a zoning change that neighbors are questioning.

Or our story last week on the revamped Sunny South Dallas Food Park, now hosted in Fair Park, which organizers say is a step toward making the 277-acre park a welcoming space for Black residents. But because the City of Dallas and other Fair Park entities historically excluded neighboring Black residents, there’s a lot to overcome — we’ve seen neighbors point to the beautiful renderings of Fair Park’s future 18-acre community park and say, “This is what will force us out of South Dallas.”

How does Dallas Free Press earn trust?

To earn trust, we need to be present. We need to listen deeply to people whom we have historically neglected.

Quite a bit of strong research around “food deserts” exists in Dallas, as well as several committed organizations attempting to chip away at these problems. But unless these attempts center community voices, they struggle to succeed.

That’s why it’s imperative for us to spend time with and listen to our neighbors who live daily with these inequities.

Research just released by UT Austin’s Center for Media Engagement showed that most Black Americans “had never met a journalist in their communities” and “didn’t know how to connect with journalists.” Not surprisingly, then, they also “felt coverage of their communities lacked context and was one-sided and incomplete.”

What is trustworthy news?

That’s the major question driving the work of The Trust Project. Their answer? “News that is accurate, accountable and ethically produced. But how do we know? That’s what the Trust Project is about.”

Dallas Free Press is thrilled to be part of The Trust Project’s Phase VII cohort. Studies show us that trust in news media is at a historic low, so our small local newsroom wants to do our part to rebuild trust and dispel misinformation and disinformation.

Our team already works hard to earn the trust of South Dallas and West Dallas neighbors, through consistent presence and deep listening. Working with The Trust Project allows us to formalize those grassroots efforts and make our work transparent by adding the project’s 8 Trust Indicators to our website.

It’s not common for news media to point out when they don’t have the answers. But we believe in transparency around our reporting and storytelling, so we’re telling readers why we chose to pursue a story, who we’re talking to, what we know — and even what we don’t know.

How we do it

How can I receive updates from Dallas Free Press?

However you like! Here are few options:

Free texts with events, resources and news sent directly to your phone
We were told from the get-go, “If you try to do this with email, you will fail.”

That’s what West Dallas leaders advised when we started discussing the possibility of community journalism for the neighborhood. People get their news from their phones, they told us.

So in June 2020, before we had an email newsletter — before we even had a website! — we started sending texts with community information to West Dallas and South Dallas residents’ phones. We use a format called Subtext, and we have three different texting services: one for South Dallas residents, one for West Dallas residents in English, and one for West Dallas residents in Spanish.

We send at least one and sometimes up to three texts a week. Subtext is a two-way texting service, so neighbors can respond to texts one-on-one, and we can text them back directly as well. The texts mostly come from Jeffrey Ruiz, our community and communication coordinator.

We’ve learned over the years that (in-person vs. digital sign-ups)

https://us17.admin.mailchimp.com/campaigns/show-email?id=5212252
https://mailchi.mp/dallasfreepress/do-you-know-jeffrey

Isn’t the news industry dying?

We’ve heard some semblance of this question often when asking people to invest in Dallas Free Press’ mission. It’s a valid question, especially considering the past couple of decades of newspaper closures, layoffs and record-low trust in media. (Here’s one of our favorite overviews of why this happened, if you want a deep dive.)

Despite all of this, we’re incredibly hopeful about the future of journalism because we believe journalism needs to change — both its business model and its commitment to public service.

The two national organizations where we find our home, the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) and the Local Independent Online News (LION) Publishers, this year named Dallas Free Press an industry “Game Changer” and the “New Publisher of the Year,” respectively. We were thrilled by the recognition, especially because the awards honored us for work that hasn’t traditionally been defined as “journalism.”

The Game Changer award was for the weekly texts we send to South Dallas and West Dallas readers, which INN called “a smart use of text messaging to grow readership and serve a community.” And when naming us New Publisher of the Year, LION praised us for “start[ing] small while maximizing impact … being truly rooted in community and public service … starting from a place of community listening, meeting real information needs, and centering equity.”

What are ‘news deserts’?

We’d first like to note that our communities don’t like to be called “deserts” of any kind. The emergence of the term “food desert” — or as we refer to it, “food apartheid” — gave rise to other similar geographic labeling, including from the news industry.

One common definition of “news desert” is “a community, either rural or urban, with limited access to the sort of credible and comprehensive news and information that feeds democracy at the grassroots level.” This is according to the University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media, which produced research reports on local news from 2016 to 2020. More recently, the research is housed in Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism and focuses on “the state of local news.”

We analyzed local “news deserts” when Dallas Free Press launched in 2020, creating a map that shows how the two neighborhoods we cover — South Dallas and West Dallas — are among the zip codes with the least news saturation.

Embed map + context

While the term “news desert” can be helpful to researchers, policymakers and funders trying to understand and address the problem of disappearing and shrinking newsrooms, it’s still a problematic term because, like “food desert,” it “obscures the vibrant life and systems in these communities” and “implies that these areas are naturally occurring.”

Ultimately, we as an industry have to reckon with the harm we’ve done historically by ignoring communities of color and leaving out their voices — both as storytellers and in our storytelling.

Dallas Free Press’ mission came out of the belief that if we truly want to find solutions to the systemic inequities that plague our city, we have to amplify the voices of our neighbors whom we have neglected. Likewise, our racial equity policy calls on us to center community residents as the #firstvoice in our content, and prioritize identifying people of color on our staff, among our freelancers and Documenters, and on our board.

https://us17.campaign-archive.com/?u=6cbf3c038f5cc4d279f4da4ed&id=315e0f3d4b
https://mailchi.mp/dallasfreepress/what-racial-equity-looks-like-for-dallas-free-press-5lafk4oju7

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Introducing Dallas Free Press, 09.01.20
A letter to our friends, neighbors, partners and supporters from Dallas Free Press executive director Keri Mitchell

It was at Mama’s Daughters’ Diner, an unofficial political hub, where I first met with West Dallas neighbors.

They reached out to me after reading my investigative piece about how suburban students cheat their way into Dallas’ renowned arts magnet high school.

It’s a short drive from West Dallas to the school in the downtown Arts District with its ample resources and opportunities, but few children from the predominantly Latinx and Black neighborhood ever make that trip. It’s not a secret that white families shun Dallas’ public schools on the whole yet manage to infiltrate the city’s most sought-after campuses, but the sordid underbelly is rarely exposed.

“This is a racial equity story,” West Dallas leaders emphasized over coffee and eggs, “and we need this kind of journalism in our community.”

That was the lightbulb moment for me.

I’d spent my entire career as a community and civic journalist, cutting my teeth in the refinery-laden exurbs of Houston and earning my stripes at the Advocate, Dallas’ neighborhood-centric magazine.

In the last decade, as resources for local news dried up, I’d grown increasingly frustrated that the business necessity of clicks and likes had hijacked the public service of putting civic information in the hands of the people. I’d begun studying nonprofit news models all over the country in hopes of reinvigorating Advocate’s dormant charitable arm.

I sat at the diner, listening to people whose families and neighbors had been worn down by decades of disinvestment on the part of the powers that be — including, in some cases, the media — and I immediately understood what I should have known already.

If we truly want to find solutions to the systemic inequities that plague our city, we have to amplify the voices of our neighbors whom we have neglected.

In January 2020, the Dallas Free Press was born. Our purpose is to focus community journalism efforts in Dallas news deserts, starting with West Dallas and South Dallas, and to build a local journalism collaborative to tackle complex civic issues.

No one in Dallas needs one more thing to consume or keep track of. Our editorial strategy is to fill gaps where they exist, and to complement rather than compete with other local media.

Our first media partner is the Dallas Weekly, a legacy Black newspaper with history reaching back to the Civil Rights era. Our South Dallas stories co-publish in the Weekly’s print and digital editions, giving us a larger audience and an opportunity to build trust with readers.

Earlier this week, our pilot collaborative project with KERA aired on the radio and published on the Dallas Free Press site. It was the first in a series on the digital divide in Dallas, funded by the national Solutions Journalism Network, that will explore the potential for internet access to shift from a luxury to a utility.

To do this important work, your support is crucial. Here’s how you can help us:

Do you have friends who live or work in South Dallas or West Dallas? Please share this newsletter with them and invite them to interact with Dallas Free Press via text, social media or email.
Do you know of potential partners or funders who might be passionate about this work? Please suggest or connect them to me.
Do you believe in this work and want to support us financially? You can donate to our North Texas Giving Day campaign now through Sept. 17, or donate directly toward our work anytime.

Journalism pathway
Our journalism pathway connects Dallas high schools to Dallas newsrooms. We spend time weekly at Pinkston, The Great James Madison, and The Legendary Lincoln high schools teaching skills such as writing, storytelling, media literacy, research and critical thinking. Our goal is to equip students with the skills and confidence to use their voices to tell community stories and engage civically.
https://mailchi.mp/dallasfreepress/what-we-learn-when-we-listen-to-students
https://mailchi.mp/dallasfreepress/introducing-our-high-school-journalists

Dallas Documenters
Every day in Dallas, many government meetings happen with no oversight or input from the public. Dallas Documenters trains and pays residents to attend and take notes on these under-reported public meetings and publishes the results, creating a community-owned public record of accountability.
https://mailchi.mp/dallasfreepress/help-support-people-powered-news-in-dallas
https://mailchi.mp/dallasfreepress/dallas-documenters-year-in-review