Reason 5,312 why reporting for print is better than TV: There’s no video camera to catch your journalism fails. That time I knelt in a nice fresh pile of dog turds while I snapped a picture? The evidence was washed away with the next load of laundry. That time NBC…
We have a nice little staff here at the Observer, but sometimes we need some side action. Here’s how you might be able to help. Writers We accept freelance pitches for stories of all shapes and sizes. Specifically, we’re looking for:…
Dallas Midtown, the mixed-use wonderland that will replace the decrepit Valley View Center, will have everything a modern urbanist could want. If everything lives up to developer Scott Beck’s vision, there will be several thousand apartments and condos, hundreds of thousands of feet of office and retail space, artists to…
Nowadays, Dallas’ network of tunnels are pretty widely reviled as an urban planning nightmare that have sucked the life off downtown’s streets. They are a “sordid story,” Downtown Dallas Inc. CEO John Crawford told the City Council this morning. “Frankly, we’re trying to do away with them as quickly as…
The one-year anniversary of the West fertilizer plant explosion that killed 15 people is a couple weeks away, and will no doubt bring with it some thoughtful coverage from various media outlets around town. Among that coverage, we now know, will be an hour-long documentary from WFAA, which will have…
Daystar is that low-budget religious channel that you flip past when you’re searching for something watchable on TV. You might have lingered for a few seconds once or twice, momentarily transfixed by Joel Osteen’s hair, but only as long as it takes for your brain to kick back into gear…
Non-journalists don’t understand how hard it is to be a newspaper columnist. It takes years, sometimes decades, of ink-stained toil in drab newsrooms. One by one, the hacks fall by the wayside. Only a select few have the talent and perseverance to be admitted to the pantheon and allowed the…
I’m not going to say whether my bike ride this morning, straight into a patch of freshly laid concrete, was an intentional but poorly executed attempt to leave leave an indelible mark on University Park (think a child’s sidewalk hand print, except with no hands and one ass), or whether…
Trail Life USA, the splinter group that formed when Irving-based Boy Scouts of America decided to admit openly gay members, is many things: openly evangelical, unapologetically homophobic, generally lame. It is not, however, a modern-day incarnation of the Hitler youth. You’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise. Over the weekend, The…
On Valentine’s Day, Dallas police arrested 41-year-old Jacqueline Edwards on suspicion of setting up at least two Craigslist robberies. The news first appeared Tuesday on WFAA’s website. An hour later, DallasBlack.com had the story. Nothing particularly suspicious there. The WFAA story is little more than a summary of a arrest…
No one who knows former Dallas City Council member Sandra Crenshaw would dispute her intelligence or obsessive dedication to public service. It’s her long and well-documented history of erratic behavior, the most recent case involving the alleged theft of a rental car, that raises questions about her fitness to hold…
When Robert Wilonsky unbolted himself from the Unfair Park throne in early 2012, there was a lot of skepticism that his boots could be properly filled. He’d started this blog several years before, one of the first and most successful blogs at an alt-weekly newspaper, and he’d slaved over it…
Jim Mitchell is a voice of moderation on The Dallas Morning News’ editorial board, generally sticking to the middle ground and getting major points for not being Tod Robberson. True to form, the argument he lays out today on the DMN’s opinion blog, that Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis’ aggressively…
As far as we know, Texas Governor Rick Perry and conservative radio host Sean Hannity are still staunchly opposed to gay marriage. That said, it was impossible to glean that from the way they cooed over one another on Hannity’s radio show this afternoon. Hannity, you see, is planning to…
James McAuley, Dallas native, ’12 Harvard grad, and current Marshall Scholar at Oxford University, is well on his way to a smashingly successful career in academics, journalism or whatever else he puts his mind to. Already, though, he seems to have settled on an avocation: trashing his birthplace in The…
The decades-long alliance between the city’s best local news station and its only daily newspaper is over. NBC 5 reported yesterday that it has teamed up with The Dallas Morning News and that the two outlets “will join together on important content like weather, politics and breaking news” in print,…
Former Editor John Wright didn’t make the most gracious exit from the Dallas Voice, what with the charges that the LGBT weekly had become a spineless rag that was “fucking its employees” and that his former boss had a thing for Thai boys. Wright’s dander has since settled. Plus, he…
Update at 3:32 p.m.Allow us to tip our hats to the hard-nosed reporters at NBC 5 who refused to give up on the trapped-puppy story. They braved several hours of near-freezing temps and were ultimately on hand to witness the dog’s rescue. City spokesman Frank Librio sends an email explaining…
The guilt Dallas once felt over the Kennedy assassination has mostly faded. For most Dallasites, the “city of hate” label is an abstraction, useful to riff on for local food blog titles but otherwise bearing no resemblance to the modern city. That’s not to say that it’s not worth marveling…
Last night, developers officially flipped the switch on 9,000 feet of new LED lights on downtown’s Bank of America Plaza they’ve been testing for the past few weeks. What followed was a lively–some might say gaudy–light show, a rapid-fire showcase of some of the fancy new colors (256 million of…
November 22 is still nine days away, but the eyes of the world are already turning toward Dallas in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy being gunned down in Dealey Plaza. City leaders knew this would happen. It’s why Mayor Mike Rawlings has been working on his…
Mireya Villareal burst onto the local media scene this past spring with a CBS 11 I-team story revealing that people, some of whom live right here in North Texas, are doing naughty things on the Internet. It was a high bar for Villareal to set for herself, almost recklessly so,…
