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Irving—Rambler Texas Media's original newspaper, 'The Rambler,' expanded into the southern Dallas County region on Jan. 1.

Rambler Texas Media, founded in 2003 and became a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2023, is a news service that is currently runs three titles within the state of Texas, 'The Rambler,' the 'Lindale News,' and the 'Ozona Stockman.' 

"Our focus is providing local community news or hyperlocal news to communities within Texas. This includes a secondary mission of rescuing community newspapers in jeopardy of or that have failed," John Starkey, publisher, said.

This secondary mission unexpectedly led the staff to take over coverage in the south Dallas County region at the start of the New Year.

"December 29, the 'Focus Daily News' shut their doors, which left a void in the south Dallas County area," Starkey said. "The 'Focus Daily News' covered the Cedar Hill, Duncanville, Desoto, Lancaster, and Hutchins communities along with three communities in Ellis County.

"We had a couple of cities reach out to us, asking if we could expand our coverage to their areas. We examined the situation and, in a matter of days, decided to expand to provide coverage for the abandoned area."

Once the decision to cover the cities was made, the staff started working with the city governments to create the best coverage of the areas and to make things official. 

"We immediately started working with each of the city secretaries to become the official newspaper for each of the cities, and as of February 10 we became the legal newspaper for Cedar Hill, Duncanville, and Lancaster," Starkey said.

With the expansion of the Rambler, readers may notice changes to the newspaper's layout.

"Instead of having more of a shotgun coverage of events and activities, we will start developing beat reporting programs where reporters will be dedicated to each topic," Starkey said.

The newspaper's layout will be sorted into sections by topic rather than by city, with one person as each section's main reporter. This change will mean an article titled "Irving basketball becomes larger than life" will be sorted by the topic of interest, "basketball," not the city's name. The article will be located in the sports section. This change will allow for more in-depth coverage of topics.

"We are not abandoning the concept of hyperlocal coverage. We are simply expanding out the coverage area," Starkey said. "We understand that this will probably increase the paper size and our staff, but we feel that people need hyperlocal coverage available to them."

The Rambler encourages people in coverage areas to tell the staff about events and how our staff can best report on your community. The newspaper needs more staff in specific cities to make these changes. If you are interested in writing for 'The Rambler,' please contact John Starkey at 214-675-6493.

Please support 'The Rambler' and its staff by reading and subscribing to the paper.