In 2025, the newsroom launched an initiative to strengthen ties with the community. Here’s how it’s going.
By Lilly Kersh
Dallas Morning News
Shafkat Anowar / Staff Photographer
Research shows trust in the media is at an all-time low. The Dallas Morning News wants to change that.
In 2025, reporters, editors and leaders came together to start a trust-building initiative to strengthen the paper’s ties with North Texas.
The News has held monthly in-house listening sessions with residents, community events in neighborhoods across Dallas, pop-up newsrooms and news literacy workshops, connecting with more than 500 residents through trust-building events last year.
Thomas Huang, assistant managing editor for journalism initiatives at The News, has helped spearhead the effort and believes building trust can help bring the community together to solve local issues.
“A local newsroom has a moral responsibility to build trust in the community and bring diverse communities together,” Huang said. “That is an essential part of our mission, in addition to being watchdogs and presenting solutions and giving people the information that they need.”
Joy Mayer, executive director of the nonprofit Trusting News, seeks to help journalists actively earn the trust of their communities and demonstrate credibility. She believes journalists shouldn’t expect trust, but should work to earn it.
“We can’t possibly address our shared challenges effectively if we don’t understand each other,” Mayer said. “Local journalism is such a powerful force to help communities connect and understand each other.”
Declining trust
Gallup research shows Americans’ confidence in the media is at a new low. A poll found just 28% had a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in newspapers, television and radio to report the news fully, accurately and fairly — down from 31% last year and 40% in 2020.
According to the same report, seven in 10 adults in the U.S. say they have “not very much” trust or confidence in the media, or “none at all.”
Declining trust in the news is nothing new, Mayer said. Gallup research shows trust has been trending downward since the 1970s.
“The more places people have to turn for information, the easier it is to get information that confirms how you already see the world,” Mayer said. “That makes it very easy to see everything that challenges how you see the world as less worthy of trust.”
The News started its initiative to build trust last year as an effort to meet people where they are, reach communities the paper had not in a while and listen to residents, said Managing Editor Amy Hollyfield.
“It sort of sprouted from there,” she said, growing into routine events and integrated efforts with support from the newsroom as a whole.
The newsroom began hosting listening sessions and community events to identify barriers to building trust.
“We wanted to make sure we were telling our own story,” Assistant Breaking News Editor Leah Waters said.
The first steps, she said, were listening, inviting, being humble, accepting criticism and using the information to improve the newsroom’s work.
A key part of the trust initiative includes partnering with local organizations in different communities, such as For Oak Cliff, Casa Guanajuato, the local Vietnamese American community at Cali Saigon Mall, Wild Detectives bookstore, Cornerstone Baptist Church and the Islamic Association of Collin County.
As part of a news literacy initiative, reporters and editors have designed and hosted media literacy workshops, where residents visit the newsroom and go through a hands-on experience of putting together their own front page.
A community listening session inspired #InDFW, a social media initiative that highlights the work being done to make North Texas a better place to live. The project aims to bring the community together by spotlighting individuals and organizations who are making a difference.
In October 2025, the trust team organized its first pop-up newsroom, with a few dozen journalists rotating through a temporary workspace in South Dallas, meeting with 70 community residents over three days.
In March, the paper held a pop-up at The Shops at RedBird, welcoming about 200 residents over three days in addition to hosting several community events.
Marcela Flores, 24, lives in Denton and came to the pop-up newsroom in Red Bird. She is concerned about how artificial intelligence and digital media can spread misinformation, but hopes events like the pop-up newsroom build stronger connections with local journalists.
“The best thing you can do is talk to each other, talk to your neighbors, consume your local news and … put a critical eye to the things you’re consuming,” she said.
Trust outcomes
Andre Butler, 48, was born and raised in Oak Cliff and lives near The Shops at RedBird, where he attended the pop-up event. He doesn’t feel the media has always heard his community’s voice and said he sees more coverage on crime in his area than on development and business.
“There’s a stigma that goes along with the newspaper that it only wants to highlight, especially on our side of town, only certain kinds of stories,” he said. “It hasn’t been the strongest partnership.”
Media institutions have harmed people, Waters said, and the newsroom’s trust-building work is an intentional effort to repair and strengthen relationships for the community’s benefit.
Butler said the pop-up was a great opportunity for the community to see what goes on in a newsroom, engage with journalists and have their voices heard.
“Having that community voice and having that insight builds a certain level of trust,” he said.
Trending Reporter Salette Ontiveros has seen the “invisible line” that has divided residents and reporters erased through trust-building initiatives. She hopes events like the pop-up newsroom allow The News to better inform residents and include more diverse perspectives in reporting.
“People are not afraid anymore,” she said. “Folks feel more confident to talk to us… They’re our eyes and ears.”
The trust initiative has connected reporters with stories — from uplifting articles on the life-changing work of local nonprofits to the close-felt impact of community businesses.
In 2026, Hollyfield wants to grow the newsroom’s efforts to build trust and “find the megaphone” to make sure the community knows The News and the people behind it.
“It’s essential to why we’re journalists,” Hollyfield said. “We’re here to selflessly serve the community. Yes, it’s a job, but it’s also a calling, and this fits hand in hand with that … it’s part of the DNA.”
By Lilly Kersh
Lilly Kersh is a local government accountability reporter at The Dallas Morning News covering Collin County with a focus on McKinney and Plano. She graduated in 2024 from the University of Georgia with a degree in journalism and was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia.
This story, originally published in The Dallas Morning News, is reprinted as part of a collaborative partnership between The Dallas Morning News and Texas Metro News. The partnership seeks to boost coverage of Dallas’ communities of color, particularly in southern Dallas.
