For those who subscribed last summer, today marks the 37^th time The Lab Report has landed in your inbox. We’re proud of that work—especially for a startup publication that began with a 20-page editorial plan produced by two people in a room the size of a walk-in closet—but we also want to keep doing more.  

Which is why today is so exciting. The Lab Report has added a fourth journalist to our newsroom. Claire Ballor, a veteran of Dallas news pages since graduating college more than a decade ago, has joined us as a staff writer. Claire most recently covered dining at the Dallas Morning News, a beat in which she treated food as a vessel to introduce readers to their neighbors. She looks for stories that are hidden around corners or behind closed doors, which is why her editors often pulled her into covering significant news events. Her narratives helped readers better understand complicated issues like fentanyl, mass shootings, and natural disasters because they focused on the people affected by them.

At the News and the Dallas Business Journal, Claire has written about City Hall and real estate and too many breaking news events to capture here. (One worth the space to mention: She was part of the team nominated for a Pulitzer for its coverage of the 2016 police ambush downtown.)

She’ll publish her first story in the coming weeks; today we’d like to introduce you. The conversation below was edited for length and clarity.

Claire Ballor, who are you? Are you from North Texas?  

I grew up in a suburb of Phoenix and came here to study English at the University of Dallas. I’ve been here ever since. I got involved with the student newspaper there, and it had never dawned on me that journalism could be a profession until then. I don’t know why, it just didn’t really occur to me. 

Journalism was always over there. 

Yes—you know, I wasn’t born into that world. But my sister really pushed me into trying the newspaper, and I loved it. I thought it was so cool to find a profession where my 10-year-old self, who was obsessed with diagramming sentences, could basically do that for a living. I landed a reporting internship at The Dallas Morning News right out of college, and my understanding of Dallas really came from that experience of being an intern on a major metro desk. Not being from here and then going to a small university in Irving, I was in a little bubble. I really got to know Dallas through that internship.

This was, what, 2015? 

Yeah, 2015. I was covering everything. Weekend cops shifts, handling the scanner, which I had no idea how to use. That led me to the breaking news desk, which was just the greatest front-row seat to humanity and to journalism at the same time. I learned how to look under the hood of things that are not so obvious to look under. 

What do you remember covering back then? Obviously, there was the 2016 shooting downtown, which earned the News a Pulitzer nomination. 

When the shooting happened, I was on a story that was really all consuming for me that obviously got a little overshadowed by the shooting. There was a Highland Park police officer who was swept away in Turtle Creek floodwaters. I stuck with that story while also doing shooting coverage, and the officer’s wife ended up asking me to write his obituary for their family because of my reporting. That was kind of eye opening to me, that there’s a way to do this that isn’t just parachuting in and dashing out when the next thing happens, you know? 

Beyond the news brief.  

Yes, those are the kind of stories I really like to do, where you get to really see something through to the end. Obviously there was a lot of chaos and murder and quick stories on the breaking news desk, but there were some larger ones like that one, which were really defining for me as a journalist. It showed me the power of showing up and seeing the story through. 

Why do you think you’re drawn to stories like that? 

I think because that’s just naturally what I’m curious about and interested in. At this point in my career, I have talked to so many people, so many kinds of people, by just being a reporter in a big city like this. And what I’ve found is people are way more similar than they are different. To me the most thrilling challenge is getting people to understand that and see that. Covering something like the Allen outlet mall shooting, I think the way that you help people understand the gravity of something like that is by showing them how similar those people were to them.

You don’t want readers to get numb to something important they’re constantly seeing, if not in their community, somewhere else in the country. 

It’s really easy for issues and subjects to be just that; an issue or a subject that feels really distant, that feels really clinical. And I think it’s easy for people to forget how those things are impacting them, and also how things that they are doing or choices they’re making are impacting others. I love to find stories where I get to take something that might feel distant or complicated or nuanced and bring it down to kind of the everyman level. I think people are deeply fascinating, and I love writing about them, finding their quirks, finding those little details, those things that just really help humanize stories.

Dallas Morning News readers are going to recognize your byline from the dining coverage you’ve been writing the past few years. Reading your work, food is treated as a way to learn more about where we live. How do you feel you approached those stories? 

The way I’ve approached food is how I’ve approached every beat I’ve been on. I guess it’s more with an anthropologist lens of, how can I understand people and society through this thing? To me, food was such a cool way to do that. Everybody has some connection to food.

Even if it’s an aversion. 

Exactly! Even if they don’t really think of themselves as being a food person, there’s so much you can learn from the food space. Look at the restaurants that are popping up in a neighborhood, and you can learn a lot about what’s happening in that neighborhood. You can see very clear patterns in demographic shifts, for example. It was such a cool way to combine a lot of things I’ve done in my career. 

Having covered breaking news and having covered City Hall and having covered real estate, all of those served me well as a food reporter. At the end of the day, I see it all as the same: I am trying to help people understand the people they live around and the world around them through a particular lens. And for the past few years, it was food. And now, at The Lab Report, that will look different, but still the same in many ways. 

Is it fair to say you went on a walkabout in Tuscany? 

[Laughs] Pretty much. A little Eat Pray Love. I was in a culinary program at a school in Florence. It was a program designed for people who wanted an accelerated learning experience where you go from there to working in a kitchen. Most of the people who were in that session with me are now working in restaurants or have their own. 

Were you one of the few who didn’t plan to work in a kitchen? 

I think I was the only one. They were like, ‘Who are you, and why are you here?’ They knew I was this American writer who just wanted to be around food, and they were very supportive. And confused. But I knew I wanted to cover food, and I knew I wanted to know as much as I could. What better way to, first of all, really know if you actually want to spend all day, every day, talking about something than to go fully immerse yourself in it, but also in another culture. 

Coming back to Dallas, you and your husband have two kids. What’s it been like raising a family here, and what stories about other families are you curious to explore in the new role? 

I’ve been so struck by how hard it is, period. I think for my generation, things have shifted so starkly from the generation before, you know, from how I was raised. What’s been really eye opening to me in becoming a parent is how challenging it can be—on a good day—and how little support there often is for parents. 

Of course, that changes drastically depending on so many different socioeconomic factors. Childcare is something I just did not understand before. I had friends who told me how challenging it was to find and how expensive it was, but I didn’t really get it until I was living it and watching the struggle that so many people go through to access something that feels quite basic. That’s something I’m looking forward to understanding even more deeply, and to really crack into how we got to where we are and where we go from here. 

I think when you become a parent, you’re hyper-aware of other people with kids. I’m just constantly struck by the fact that so many people seem to be coming from a place of making it work in spite of so many things, you know? In spite of the fact that childcare is so difficult to access and expensive. In spite of the fact that so many workplaces do not create environments in which people can really be effective as parents. 

Something that has really sharpened for me and come into focus since becoming a parent is just how challenging it really is for so many people. And how financially challenging it is, too. I think it has really changed how I see people and how I see the world. 

I do feel like my work as a reporter and as a writer has significantly benefited from being a mother and from having the responsibility of helping someone understand the world from a blank slate. That has truly made me better at explaining things as a writer and as a journalist, because I have to do it every day for two tiny people. 

I’m really looking forward to combining my perspective and curiosity as a mother with my skillset as a journalist in this role. 

Claire Ballor joins The Lab Report later this month, but you can say hi now. 

Matt Goodman is the co-founder and editor of The Lab Report. [email protected].

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The Lab Report Dallas is a local journalism project published by the Child Poverty Action Lab (CPAL). Its newsroom operates with editorial independence.

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