We have news! The next email you receive from The Lab Report will contain our first story. That’s coming on July 9. From then on, our journalism will land in your inbox every Wednesday. We’re excited to share it with you. We’ll be starting with a newsletter until our website is complete in the fall.
First, a quick recap. The Lab Report is a new publication co-founded by veteran local journalists Sharon Grigsby, formerly of the Dallas Morning News, and Matt Goodman, a former D Magazine editor. It is powered by the nonprofit Child Poverty Action Lab (CPAL). We’re focused on in-depth reporting that helps Dallas be a great city for every family, in every neighborhood. We’ll explore topics that shape how these families live: housing, healthcare, education, and safety. We’ll also introduce the people who connect them all. Our evidence-based journalism seeks to find what’s working, what’s not, and why. And, importantly, for whom?
With that out of the way, another piece of news: we’ve grown. Kelli Smith has joined our newsroom as a staff writer, and you’ll be reading her work later this summer. She’s been a reporter at the Dallas Morning News since 2021, which included a short stint covering breaking news and three years as the paper’s public safety beat reporter.
Kelli did impressive work while covering the nation’s ninth largest police department.
She’s explored why perceptions about crime don’t always match the data. Kelli broke the news that former Chief Eddie García was retiring as the city’s top cop to take a job in Austin. She used the case of a disabled veteran who was denied a restroom to explore whether the civilian oversight board had the teeth necessary to hold officers accountable. Her last piece for The News is the most thorough profile you’ll find of new Chief Daniel Comeaux. Judges from newspapers across the country named her the paper’s Breaking News Reporter of the Year for 2024.
We’re thrilled to have the Notre Dame grad join our publication, and you can reach her right here.
That’s it for us today. We hope you have a wonderful Fourth of July and we’ll see you with the real work on July 9. Thanks again for subscribing; we’d love for you to forward this email to a friend who is interested in data-driven local journalism and storytelling that humanizes statistics. They can sign up here to receive our newsletter.
More (very) soon,
Matt and Sharon