Pegasus News content partner interview: Dallas Voice

Updated 09:34 a.m., April 6, 2009

by Alex Bentley

Unlike the vast majority of our content partners, the Dallas Voice is one of the few to maintain both a print and online presence. The Voice, which joined on as a content partner in February 2007 (their first story was "Row spices up Stonewall Democrats of Dallas candidate forum") is the source for LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) news in the Dallas area and beyond. Appropriately for a paper, they cover anything and everything under the sun, just from an LGBT angle. Tammye Nash is the senior editor for the Voice and graciously answered my questions on behalf of the entire paper.

Pegasus News: When did the Dallas Voice begin? To your knowledge, was there any kind of LGBT media coverage in Dallas prior to the Voice?

Nash: Dallas Voice put its first issue on the stands in May 1984. We are, in fact, getting ready to celebrate our 25th anniversary on May 22 this year. We are working already on putting together a very special commemorative edition issue that week that will include a look back at the highlights and lowlights for our community over the last 25 years as well as looking forward to what’s to come.

There were two LGBT publications in Dallas at the time the Voice launched. One was called This Week in Texas. It was a small format magazine that was distributed statewide and focused mainly on entertainment and what was happening in the gay nightclubs. It was affectionately called TWIT. The other was a pony tab newspaper put out by Roy Hall who was a one-man show. He did it for the love of publishing.

Phil Johnson, a longtime activist now in his 80s who is known as the LGBT historian of North Texas, did distribute a small newspaper for a short time in the 1970s.

Pegasus News: How long have you been with the Voice? What were your reasons for joining the paper?

Nash: I have been with Dallas Voice for 18 years total.

My first day with Dallas Voice was June 6, 1988. I left for about three years, from March 2001 to May 2004, and spent that time working in two mainstream newspapers in the area, just because I felt I needed to do something different after 13 years. But in early May 2004, I stopped by the Voice offices to say hello to my friends here and see their new offices, and Robert Moore, the owner and publisher, asked if I would be interested in returning. That was the same month that the Voice was celebrating its 20th anniversary.

When I first started work for Dallas Voice, I had been working as editor of the Van Progress, near Canton, when that paper was bought out by a large chain based in Dallas. The management in the chain asked me to move to Daingerfield to take over as editor of the weekly paper there, to replace the previous editor/publisher who was leaving. I did, but only remained 6 months, because I decided I didn’t like the way the chain’s management handled things and I didn’t like the direction they wanted that paper to take. About the time I was deciding to leave Daingerfield, a friend told me about an advertisement she had seen for a gay paper in Dallas that needed a reporter. I applied, Robert and editor Dennis Vercher hired me, and I fell in love with the place and the people.

I returned to the Voice in 2004 for the same reasons I have always enjoyed working here: First, it is a small company owned by men (now one man) who cares not just about making profit but about having a positive impact on the community we serve, and who cares about the people who work for him; and because I see this job as a way to make a difference in my community, and in how the world sees my community.

Pegasus News: Some people may not understand why there is a Dallas paper that specifically covers LGBT issues, entertainment, and events. Explain why you think the Voice is a necessity in Dallas.

Nash: Dallas Voice is just like any small town community newspaper, except that our community is defined by a shared characteristic of our readers rather than by geography. People can find general news about Dallas, Texas, the country and the world, in the larger dailies that serve that area, as well as local and national TV stations and the Internet, as can the members of a specific community. But the members of that community can only find a constant source of local news that many of the bigger media outlets routinely overlook, but that is vitally important to those community members, in their hometown newspaper. That’s what Dallas Voice is: the hometown newspaper for LGBT people in Dallas, Fort Worth and North Texas.

Dallas Voice covers LGBT-specific news and events that mainstream media outlets don’t have time for or interest in, and we cover “mainstream” news from an LGBT-specific angle, showing our readers how this news item affects them as LGBT readers.

Dallas Voice is a “niche market” publication, and that, I believe, is the direction the newspaper industry overall is moving in. We just have a head start.

Pegasus News: What are some of the best/most important stories the Voice has covered during your time there?

Nash: That is a very, very hard question. Dallas Voice has covered the AIDS epidemic from day one. We have been there for the protests and the funerals and the new treatment announcements. It’s hard to find a more important ongoing story than that.

But there are a few moments that I can point to that really stand out. In the late 1980s, State District Judge Jack Hampton said that a young man who killed two gay men for fun didn’t deserve as stiff a sentence as he would have had he killed two housewives out shopping. That was a big story.

Dallas Voice from the beginning carried stories about the status of the Texas sodomy laws and challenges to it. One of our biggest stories came in 1998 when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the sodomy law.

Another big story has been the gay marriage issue, which we started covering back in the mid 1990s when a lawsuit was filed in Hawaii challenging their marriage laws, and which led to the first anti-gay-marriage constitutional amendment. Massachusetts legalized gay marriage in 2004, and of course, a lot of attention on that front is focused on California right now. But the marriage equality battle is also playing out right now in Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine and across the country and the world. Sweden just today adopted a “gender-neutral” marriage law.

We covered the 1987 march on Washington for gay rights, the election of Glen Maxey as the first openly gay person in the Texas Legislature, ordinances banning anti-gay discrimination in Fort Worth and Dallas, the election of Lupe Valdez as the county’s first openly LGBT sheriff. The list goes on and on and on. There have been thousands of highly important stories over the last 25 years.

Pegasus News: The Dallas smoking ban is about to go into effect – how do you think this will affect bars such as Illusions or Round Up Saloon?

Nash: I am not sure I am the right person to answer this. I actually live in Fort Worth, and I have a wife and two kids, so I don’t go out to the Dallas nightclubs — or any nightclubs — all that often. I also have a bias because I am a smoker. I will say that I think some clubs won’t see much difference because they already have outside patio areas in place where people will continue to be able to smoke. Others that don’t have those patios or balconies face the difficulty and expense of adding them, and some have said they have no room available to do so. I think the smoking ban could hurt smaller businesses that don’t have any outdoor facilities or any room to add them. But at the same time, the ban might make those same clubs more appealing to non-smokers who wouldn’t go there before.

Pegasus News: What would you like your readers to get out of your paper?

Nash: Information, education and entertainment. I want the people who read the Voice, either in print or online, to find information that helps improve their lives, even if just by giving them the information they need to decide where to go on a Saturday night. Obviously, I want more than just that. I want the Voice to educate our readers about issues that have a real impact on their lives, their rights, their health. And I want them to be entertained, as well (although not necessarily by the same stories!).

Pegasus News: How much of a role, if any, do readers play in how you all approach your stories?

Nash: Well, in a general sense, the fact that our target readership is the LGBT community forms the entire framework for how we approach stories: We write about things and issues and events in or affecting the LGBT community. Honestly, though, our readers affect our work in the same way readers affect any newspaper. We are professional journalists who approach our stories in an unbiased and objective way. We don’t “slant” the stories to make any reader or readers happy. We just do our best to tell the story.

Pegasus News: What do you see as the future of the Dallas Voice?

Nash: I think that while many newspapers are suffering, Dallas Voice will weather the current recession and come back as strong as ever, simply because our readership continues to grown both online and for the print edition. We serve a very specific market, which gives us an edge. If you look around, the bigger papers that have tried to be everything to everyone are the ones in the worst shape now, and many of them are going back to a more "community newspaper" model. We are already a community newspaper. Of course, we will also continue to change with the times to reach out to our younger, more tech-savvy readers who tend to conduct so much of their business and lives online. We see ourselves as not just a newspaper but as a media company.