Amy Hollyfield, managing editor, The Dallas Morning News (Photo credit: The Dallas Morning News)
Bob Miller | for E&P Magazine
The Dallas Morning News launched a comprehensive community initiative in 2025 to foster greater trust.
The effort began with listening sessions that evolved into fully immersive programs, including media literacy training and pop-up newsrooms, according to Managing Editor Amy Hollyfield.
The first pop-up newsroom was held in October in South Dallas, which Hollyfield described as an overlooked, underserved and traumatized community.
“There’s a church there that has a co-working space that we rented for three days. And we made flyers, we reached out to everyone we’ve been meeting with all year. We went door-to-door to some restaurants and left notes, just to say, ‘Hey, we’re coming in. Please come see us — journalists for the Dallas Morning News. We want to hear your stories, talk to you and meet you.’ We set up shop, not knowing what would happen. … We brought in our photographers and set up a mini studio so people could get a professional photo. That was a cool bonus. And I think it was part of what got people in. Over the course of three days, we had maybe 100 people that came and about 30 to 40 journalists that rotated in and out.”
The event proved to be the ultimate crowd-sourcing experiment, sparking several story ideas. Journalists discovered foundations they didn’t know about, interesting people in the neighborhoods, and learned about the culture there.
The community was particularly responsive to the paper’s offer to provide professional headshots to anyone who needed one. They had people return to the event to get photos made. For many, a professional headshot is a luxury that they couldn’t afford otherwise. The images could be used on professional profiles.
About 30 journalists participated in a pop-up newsroom event in South Dallas for The Dallas Morning News. Community members were invited to visit with staffers and share their stories. (Photo credit: The Dallas Morning News)
Ultimately, the goal is to build trust.
“We’re all living in this society, right? And we see the horrific dip in trust in the media, and we talk about it all the time,” Hollyfield said. “We formed a committee. It’s a newsroom committee of maybe 15 people, and it’s a mix of reporters and editors who are really having those regular conversations.”
As part of the initiative, the newsroom has provided information on how journalists and editors do their work. The newsroom created a simulation of a newsroom at the Dallas Public Library. The first was organized in April; then another in November.
“We built a class,” she said. “It’s like a 2-to-2 ½ hour experience where they come in and go desk-by-desk. We had people volunteer to come in and talk about business, education, breaking news, photography and audience, and walk people through and have them pick a story at each point, and then sit down with a copy editor and plan a page.”
A Dallas Morning News photographer took business headshot portraits of people in the South Dallas community as part of a multi-day pop-up newsroom event. (Photo credit: The Dallas Morning News)
Sessions also include Q&As with editors, with someone leading a small group at each stopping point.
“They were thoughtful,” she said. “There were students, older people, people who aren’t readers and people who were like, ‘What is this?’”
The first session drew 90 people, which was too many, so they capped the next class at about 30.
The plan is to do a few media literacy trainings per year.
The Dallas Morning News profiled every homicide victim in Dallas in 2024. At the beginning of 2025, the newspaper hosted an event in the neighborhood with the most homicides in Dallas. The event included family members of one of the victims, a police officer who’d been working cases, a reporter and a politician.
sit down with a copy editor and plan a page.”
The pop-up newsrooms are part of a larger effort The Dallas Morning News is rolling out to build more trust within communities in the Dallas area. (Photo credit: The Dallas Morning News)
“That was an extraordinary event, because people said, ‘Nobody talks about this stuff,’” Hollyfield said. “’Thank you for bringing us together.’ We started with the intention of going to the neighborhoods and being truth tellers on some kind of news story.”
On another occasion, the newsroom hosted an event about an area taken by eminent domain in a struggling neighborhood that was never developed.
The newspaper has conducted surveys before and after events to quantify results. Though the sample size is small, more readers are saying they are “very trustful” or “somewhat trustful” after the sessions than before.
To find out more about the Dallas Morning News Initiative, go to its landing page: https://www.dallasnews.com/trust/
Bob Miller has spent more than 25 years in local newsrooms, including 12 years as an executive editor with Rust Communications. Bob also produces an independent true crime investigative podcast called The Lawless Files.