In May 2024, Eugene C. Patterson Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy and Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Journalism and Media Studies Minor (JAM) Stephen Buckley joined the Dallas Morning News as its Public Editor.
This position follows his three-year tenure as a Duke professor and decades of work at multiple major news agencies including the Washington Post, Tampa Bay Times, and Global Press Journal since his graduation from Duke in 1989. The News invited Buckley to a project focused on building trust among readers, which ultimately culminated in the organization creating a Public Editor position and asking him to fill the role.
As a Public Editor, or “reader representative,” Buckley serves as a bridge between DMN and its readers. His main focus at the DMN is answering an influx of emails about reader concerns, as well as writing columns offering them answers to the most prominent ones. He then takes these concerns to the newsroom to help reporters reform their coverage, sometimes including his own analysis.
Grant Moise, publisher of the News, has a “three-pronged philosophy” which informs the Public Editor role: transparency, accountability, and humility. Buckley has adopted these tenets into his ombudsman role.
“I think about those three qualities a lot when I’m dealing with the public. In recent years, [they have] felt increasingly disconnected to the media, and so I’m really trying to help readers feel like they are connected to the Dallas Morning News. One of the responses I often get is, ‘Hey, thanks for listening. Thanks for engaging.’ Even if my response isn’t what they expected or what they wanted, they’re just glad to have somebody who answered their email and who took their concern to heart,” Buckley said.
The role is dynamic, and he offers the same validations, explanations, and attention to concerns in the newsroom as he does to readers’ emails. He prioritizes applauding journalists where they need applause, and suggesting improvements where improvements are needed.
In part, he attributes the ability to offer constructive, validating feedback to his work in editing and reporting, which has informed his current role.
“My experiences both as a reporter and as an editor allow me to feel a real, genuine empathy for the reporters and editors of the Dallas Morning News. Reporting and editing is hard. These are really some tough jobs, and I am genuinely sympathetic and genuinely empathetic,” said Buckley.
He often reflects on his decades of personal experiences in journalism, which have allowed him to lead newsroom conversations with humility and compassion.
“Whenever I’m writing about work that the newsroom is doing, I’m often thinking about how difficult it is to do all the things that you should do to produce great journalism. It’s hard to get facts right. It’s hard to get all the voices that you want to get in. It’s hard to think, ‘How is this story fair? Is it fair enough?’” Buckley said.
Buckley believes, though, in the importance of always addressing concerns of fairness, of objectivity, and of bias in newsrooms, as he names this public conflict as one of the “top challenges” in news reporting today.
“Not just for the Dallas Morning News, but I think for most news organizations, that’s the question that people have for us: ‘Are you being fair? Are you allowing my side to have a say or have a voice?’ And there are no easy answers to that, but I think it really helps to surface that issue, grapple with it, to honestly figure out, say to ourselves, ‘Are we really being fair and objective, balanced, unbiased?’ I’m certainly hoping that the Dallas Morning News continues its efforts to address issues of fairness and objectivity, because I really do think that the Dallas Morning News takes this issue very seriously,” said Buckley.
Though many major news outlets don’t invest in public editors like the Dallas Morning News, Buckley still believes other agencies have begun to effectively tackle public concerns about fairness, objectivity, and bias in productive ways.
He specifically noted a pattern of increased transparency around reporting processes, which has manifested differently across different organizations. Buckley mentioned the accessible biographies of reporters on websites that help to “get a sense of who this person is.” On the editorial side, he noticed more editors writing regular columns explaining their roles and processes, as well as holding events on their journalism and practices.
“None of those involve hiring a public editor. But I think they’re all small but really helpful steps in bridging that gap [between readers and the newsroom],” said Buckley.
This piece was written by JAM student Halle Vazquez (T ’27) in her new role reporting on the DeWitt Wallace Center.