Revolution at Dallas Daily

D Magazine, Jun 01, 2004 by Flournoy, Craig

ON THE MORNING OF January 22, more than 800 employees of the Dallas Morning News filed into a hotel ballroom to hear the publisher's annual state-of-the-newspaper speech. Jim Moroney strode to the podium, a gangly 47-year-old knot of energy in a powder-blue shirt and a red-patterned tie. In years past, his presentation had been brief, his goals modest. Not this time.

The News, he declared, was like an outwardly healthy person with serious physical problems. "The patient may appear healthy, but, frankly, he's slowly dying." In the past three years, profitability had dropped 35 percent, he said. Home delivery had declined 10 percent since 2000.

Moroney, who had been publisher of the Belo Corp. newspaper for less than three years, compared the paper to the American colonies and France in the 18th century and Russia in the early 20th century. In each case, he said, arrogant heads of state ignored the needs of those they governed. Those societies needed radical changes, and so, now, did the News. "We need a revolution of our culture," Moroney said.

To accomplish this, the publisher insisted, the newspaper needed to shake off ennui. Managers should stop stifling the staff's criticism. Editors should praise--not punish--dissenters. "Be thankful for the people who speak up," he said. "They are our best hope for getting it right."

Moroney's "Fidel" speech lasted an hour and 20 minutes. In the final minute, he used the word "revolution" seven times, and the crowd in the ballroom gave him a standing ovation. Many were stunned by what they'd heard, particularly Moroney's praise for newsroom hellraisers. "I thought he was talking right at me," says Pam Maples, a 14-year veteran of the newspaper and a Pulitzer Prize winner. "When he was saying things like that, I felt like I finally fit in."

The publisher is proud of his call to arms. Unlike his predecessor, he encouraged staffers to speak on the record for this story.

Moroney has definite ideas for the paper's transformation. For one thing, he sees investigative reporting as central to revitalizing the News. "Enterprise reporting is essential to a great newspaper," he says now. "The highest calling of this profession is well-done investigative journalism."

In the last decade, Brooks Egerton has been the Most Prolific investigative reporter at the News. Moroney's message excites him, but he wonders if the paper's culture is too entrenched. "In recent years, the Morning News has tended to hire peopleboth as editors and reporters-whose orientation is not to rock the boat," Egerton says. "They have bred these rabbits to be docile."

Whether the rabbits or the revolutionaries will win is an open question.

DAVID HANNERS CAN STILL recall his sense of excitement when he landed a job with the News in 1982. The paper was hiring young, hungry types like him and unleashing them. For decades, the News had displayed little appetite for enterprise journalism. But at the time Hanners got his job, it was battling the Dallas Times Herald for journalistic supremacy. One would win; the other would fold.

What occurred in that period demonstrates that great journalism is mostly a matter of will. Before 1986, the Dallas Morning News had never won a Pulitzer. Between 1986 and 1994, it won six. George Rodrigue and I won that first Pulitzer for a series we did on racial discrimination in public housing. A series demonstrating that Texas prosecutors routinely excluded blacks from juries was cited in the U.S. Supreme Court's 1986 ruling prohibiting that practice, and it earned a grand prize from the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards. Four reporters and a photographer who produced a special section about the homeless in Dallas won the Newspaper Guild's 1986 Heywood Broun award. All this in a single year.

More awards totted in. So did real-world results. The News convinced the federal government to shut down taxpayerfunded slums and kill plans to build new ones. It took on institutionalized violence against women from Thailand to Texas. "The paper had an appetite for red-meat journalism," says Dan Malone, who teamed with fellow reporter Lorraine Adams to produce a series of stories exposing police misconduct that won a Pulitzer for investigative reporting in 1992.

But by then the atmosphere was already changing. This became clear when a sheriff sued the News for libel over stories exposing drug dealing in South Texas. That led to an internal showdown at the paper. At a November 1991 meeting, the paper's management demanded that their attorneys be allowed to reveal confidential sources if, in pretrial depositions, they denied having provided information. The reporters--Gayle Reaves, David McLemore, and Hanners--refused. They said this would not only betray promises of confidentiality, but also could endanger lives.

Jim Sheehan, then the president of Belo, disagreed. According to Hanners, "Sheehan told us, 'This company can protect sources, or it can protect shareholders. Given that choice, you can rest assured this company will always fall on the side of the shareholder.' " Sheehan, who retired in 1993, did not return several phone calls.