How The Dallas Morning News has you covered for football season (2024)

We seek to produce daily journalism that drives discussion and impact and that ultimately helps our community prosper. This newsletter seeks to shed more light on our work and who we are in an effort to build more trust with you, our readers. Below is a look inside the DMN newsroom.

While football season kicked off just days ago, our planning for the 2024 season began in January.

Why?

Because we know for many of you, football is more than a fun sport. It’s a way of life. It screams Texas pride. It’s where so many of you spend countless hours with your kids on Friday nights or with your friends and family on Saturdays at colleges all over the country and then on Sundays, with so many of you rooting for dem’ Cowboys.

Football is also a business that pumps millions of dollars into our state economy each year and is where some of our taxpayer dollars are spent in many of our North Texas communities. It’s such a big business for NFL owner Jerry Jones that his Cowboys are now the first professional football team to be valued at $10 billion, according to a recent article by the sports business publication Sportico. By comparison, the next most valued team, Sportico reported, is the West Coast’s Los Angeles Rams at $7.8 billion.

Closer to home, the sport has reached new levels of excitement for Southern Methodist University. The college vigorously fought to join the ACC and it will play its first conference game later this month.

This is why we cover football all year and why during the off season, we re-examine our coverage to ensure we are providing you with exclusive and informative journalism that you can’t find anywhere else.

On any given week, 85 people are involved in our football coverage, from our full-time Cowboys, college and high school reporters and columnists, to multiple photojournalists, editors and designers and audience analysts, to many freelance and contract clerks who help us update scores for high school games all across the Metroplex, said Damon Marx, our deputy sports editor.

“Our goal is not to tell you where the football is — you can get that information immediately on social media — we strive to tell you where the ball is going next and why. This applies to everything that happens in what I like to call the Cowboys Universe.”

“Beyond the daily coverage from full-time Cowboys beat writers David Moore and Calvin Watkins, plus columnists Tim Cowlishaw and Kevin Sherrington and a team of photographers, what you can expect from us that you can’t get anywhere else is … accuracy, accountability and timely analysis,” Damon shared.

The same is true for our other football coverage. Because of SMU’s leap to the ACC, Sports Editor Tommy Magelsson felt strongly that we needed to devote more resources to covering the team. So earlier this year, Lia Assimakopoulos was promoted to cover SMU as well as our favorite local hockey team, the Stars.

While she knows it’s important to focus on stories about the players and recruiting efforts, she also is doing a great job of offering you insight into what goes on behind the scenes, stories ranging from the costs of facility upgrades to record-breaking fundraising.

“I’m also excited to visit some of these ACC campuses and towns to share with readers what they can expect from some of these road trips,” Lia said.

While Lia has moved on from high school coverage, we still have multiple journalists covering this full-time. I’m proud to say we’re the only media outlet in our region that covers over 150 public and private high schools every single week. That means we have staff at nearly 70 games each week, bringing the passion of Friday night football to our print and digital pages.

And once again, it’s not just the box-scores that our team is chasing. The Dallas Morning News is writing about the issues high school sports athletes face — such as their health and concussions, the new NIL landscape and shifting demographics. Before her promotion, Lia personally wrote about population changes and how they impact high school football and about their transfer policies.

If you don’t follow our football coverage, you aren’t fully informed.