Following Other Black Pioneers in Journalism: A Conversation With Leona Allen Ford

In recent years, an unprecedented number of women of color have risen to executive and shot-calling positions in news media in the United States — but their representation is still far below their proportion of the population. The Women’s Media Center’s recently released report, “Women of Color in U.S. News Leadership 2023,” includes interviews with 20 history-making women of color news executives in television, print, digital media, and radio who shed light on how they have navigated their careers in media, the ways in which they create inclusive workplaces, and why it is crucial for news media staffs to reflect the diversity of their audiences. Below is our conversation with Leona Allen Ford, deputy publisher and chief talent and diversity officer of DallasNews Corp.

Promoted in 2020 to be DallasNews Corp.’s deputy publisher and chief talent and diversity officer, Leona Allen Ford ascended to that spot after stints as a reporter, then editorial writer, then deputy managing editor for local news at what is the nation’s 11th-largest daily newspaper, The Dallas Morning News, her company’s flagship.

In 1994, she returned to that publication in her hometown from the Akron Beacon Journal in Ohio, where she was a lead reporter on 1994’s Pulitzer Prize-winning series, “A Question of Color.” Before Akron, she reported for the Dallas Times Herald, which shuttered in 1991.

Allen Ford, who is Black, dubs herself an “inclusion advocate, leadership developer ... and change leader across multiple print and digital platforms.”

This is an abridged version of her conversation with the Women’s Media Center.

Why did you choose the news business?

I got the bug in high school in Dallas, starting with the newspaper at Skyline High. At that majority-White charter school there weren’t a lot of people who looked like me in our journalism classes.

Lola Johnson and Clarise Tinsley, who is still on the air, were among the few Black people, and certainly Black women, who were news broadcasters in Dallas at the time. I was planning to go into broadcast initially, but I also loved writing. And at Skyline, where I was living through the integration of Dallas schools, I was always trying to tell those stories of how Black students thrust into that environment were adjusting.

What made you want to work in the city where you were born and raised?

I was interested in really giving a voice to communities like the southern suburbs of Desoto, Lancaster, Cedar Hill — and in probing how its shift, its spike in Black residents happened. Those residents also were in search of better schools and the opportunities that any parent — Black, White, blue, green, or purple — wants. How can we tell those stories in robust and deep ways, with real analysis?

My focus has been on running the suburban team and the full metro team in ways that differentiate us, inclusively, showing the sense of place here as the community has continued to change. Now, Dallas County is 40% Latino.

I’ve worked to help our teams understand: ‘You cannot cover these communities by sitting at your desk.’

How do you execute that kind of strong, expansive, contextual coverage?

Like a lot of newsrooms, we’ve struggled. We’ve not had enough journalists of color and not a lot at the executive level. You realize that reporters of color can’t be the only ones doing these stories on communities of color.

So, for our editors, I organized a bus tour of South Dallas, where most residents are Black and, after that, Brown. We have to see for ourselves what the stories are. We have to show that those stories are not all about poverty and strife.

We’ve been meeting people from community groups, from church groups, gathering them in the same place to listen and to talk.

It’s all of our jobs to cover this community authentically, building sources and knowing neighborhoods. Many drive to our office from their White middle-class neighborhoods. You will not know the Dallas-Fort Worth area doing that.

These sessions with community groups and so forth have been going on intermittently for decades. Are you surprised that diversity in coverage still requires all this extra effort?

I describe this as a journey. We will continue to be on it.

Now the competition isn’t just media companies. We’ve lost staffers to architecture companies, dental offices. Everyone was realizing, ‘I need writers, people who can analyze data.’ Our skills are transferrable.

We are still in this tough, tough fight. One of the first things I did as a leader is push the idea of promoting from within, burnishing people’s skills, creating a pipeline, returning to having a full-time recruiter, not just a point person in HR who doesn’t really know what journalism is.

How far has that gone in shaping the demographics of the newsroom?

Our rank-and-file staffing is decent. But our leadership continues to be overwhelmingly White and male. Women make up 44% of leadership, which nevertheless is 69% White.

And we know that, in the decision-making about what and who gets covered, who’s in leadership is key.

In 2020, I started a leadership development program. It’s a tool for recruiting, retention, and growth. Seventy-two people have gone through that program, which provides one-on-one coaching from an outside expert. The program has a selection committee that makes sure that the pool of program applicants is diverse.

Another linchpin is we started a DEI council. We’ve someone from every team on it. The council came up with the idea that we’d have a year-round diversity recruiter.

We put in protocols around hiring. Don’t send me a hiring pool that isn’t diverse. We are repurposing our recruitment at job fairs and again attending conferences of the journalists of color organizations, after most companies had pulled back.

We work with Larry Graham, a former journalist who is the founder and executive director of the Diversity Pledge Institute, an incubator of diverse talent.

As you make those strides, what remaining challenges are you mindful of?

We’re making that transition to digital, while print is still paying the bills. That’s a major challenge.

We’re facing that challenge with Katrice Hardy as our executive editor. She’s creating fantastic content and the most diverse newsroom leadership team — I think, in the country — of journalists who really understand how to put stories together and connect them to our audiences. She’s a stellar journalist and a Black woman from Louisiana who understands how to cover the entire community.

I am grateful and proud to be in a place where we are not in a doomsday mindset. We’re not a dying industry. We will be in a different form. But local journalism is more important now than ever. If we are not there, what will the public know about what’s happening with their tax dollars? With the police department?

We’re covering this community as inclusively as we can. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that our population’s diversity is increasing. For DallasNews Corp. to grow, we’ve got to stay focused on that growth.

It’s not just a social construct, it’s a business imperative.