Pulitzer Prize winner and Dallas Morning News columnist William McKenzie speaks to Carolyn Barta’s Editorial opinion class Tuesday afternoon. (SPENCER EGGERS/The Daily Campus)

Three Dallas Morning News editorial writers discussed their recent Pulitzer Prize-winning series on the disparity between North and South Dallas with journalism students Tuesday.
 

Colleen McCain Nelson, Tod Robberson and Bill McKenzie took turns laying out the details of their 3-year-old project that earned them a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing earlier this month.
 

Although the DMN started the project in 2007, the prize was based on a series of 10 columns that were written in 2009.
 

“We tried to choose a range of editorials that showed results,” Nelson said.
 

The “Bridging Dallas’ North-South Gap” project aimed at pointing out problems in the southern half of Dallas, asks whether that would happen in North Dallas and advocates change. The project also tries to point out the potential in areas like Pleasant Grove Crossroads, Red Bird Renewed and Oak Cliff.
 

“We wanted to have an area that showed a good cross-section, but also had a reason to be hopeful,” Robberson said.
 

The editorial team knew that they would need a lot of data to truly understand South Dallas and hired outsiders to do the job, Nelson said. They were overwhelmed when they got the data in 2008.
 

“It was hard to know where to even start,” Nelson said.
 

The team looked at teen pregnancy statistics, crime rates, unemployment, the history of the area and even commute times.
 

“These are people that, in some cases, have to travel 90 minutes to work,” Robberson said.
 

He said that long commute rates often leave little time for South Dallas residents to landscape, make home repairs or help their kids with homework. Little things that, he says, affect the overall look of a neighborhood.
 

And although the editorial page was trying to help point out the North-South gap and improve Dallas as a whole, they did meet resistance.
 

“A lot of people were suspicious and they didn’t want editorial writers telling them what’s best for their neighborhood,” Nelson said.
 

Nelson also said that they “just tried to listen” to South Dallas residents and that they brought in different community members to talk to the editorial team.
 

While the team did meet outside resistance, they said they were thankful that Dallas Morning News publisher Jim Moroney and the A. H. Belo Corporation, which owns the newspaper, invested in the project.
 

“Local ownership can make a difference,” McKenzie said, about how Belo has an incentive to let writers call for improvement in the town in which it is located.

Nelson and Robberson echoed this statement, but on a broader level, pointing out that having a more developed South Dallas can only help the city as a whole.

“You really do have an economic interest in fixing this problem,” Nelson said. “If South Dallas succeeds, everybody wins.”

One thing that Nelson pointed out to the audience was a column that appears the first Friday of each month in the paper called “10 drops in the bucket.” Nelson focuses on 10 eyesores or problems in South Dallas and chronicles their improvement each month.

This is one way that Nelson said they hold the government accountable.

“While city hall might not like 10 drops in the bucket, the people on the ground do,” McKenzie said.

Although the team won a Pulitzer Prize, they said they still plan to write on the North-South gap.
“It’s a great honor, but now it’s also incumbent upon us to take this to the next level,” McKenzie said.