The Plan Going Forward

On doing more with less

For the last 10 weeks I have posted an article every Tuesday morning, each of them long, around 3,000 words. I am just going to shoot you straight, I am running out of material.

I was bound to run out of things to say, at least at the pace I was saying them. I do not want to pretend I always have something to say, nor subject you to that either.

No contrarian opinions or Greek philosophy today. All I am going to offer you is my real name and a little more about me, say thank you, and tell you the plan going forward.

To get to the anticlimactic part out of the way: Hi, I’m Kirk. (Hi, Kirk.) I’m a thirty-year-old guy who grew up in Memphis before moving to Dallas a little over a decade ago to attend SMU, which led to now working in real estate development as tipped off last week, and I live off of Lemmon near Love Field with my wife.

For those of you expecting anything more exciting than that, sorry to burst your bubble. Several of you wrote in with theories as to who I might be, and while I was flattered by all of them, I am a nobody (and plan on remaining one). If you Google my name, the first thing that pops up is a minor league baseball player who last touched the mound before I was born. I am not even the most famous Kirk Presley, and there are only four of us. I don’t say that to put myself down in any way. I just mean, politically speaking or otherwise, none of you are going to have heard of me. I am just a guy who liked writing, with a couple of things to get off my chest, and now my chest is lighter.

Writing pseudonymously (big word) never sat well with what I've been arguing for. It was nice that it kept the focus on what was being said and not who was saying it, but it came with a credibility tradeoff as well.

The Plan

When I started writing I felt like I had a few specific things to say, and seeing as people seemed interested in reading and sharing it, I kept writing. A decade-plus lived in Dallas came out through my keyboard, years of ideas and opinions I’ve never said out loud or found a home for.

Some of them, the thoughts of an carpetbagging outsider who grew up somewhere else with much less going on. Some of them, the thoughts of a newly-minted or at least imagined insider who spends (an inordinate amount of) time at my day job thinking about city or state policy, particularly regarding housing.

This is a project I am still very interested in pursuing. At the very least, I want to provide a counterweight to the “everything is bad/corruption/insert thing I don’t like” social media discourse that both right- and left-leaning people seem to play into, especially regarding local politics.

There will be more articles. Look for 1,200 or 1,800 words in the future, something more respectful both of your time and mine. Weekly seems to work, but again, I don’t want to pretend I always have something worth saying. This is one of those weeks, the city’s Friday afternoon announcement that it’s broke notwithstanding. (Raise taxes. There: I fixed it.)

Going forward, I plan to lean into data and visualizations as a follow up to the Leaked City Hall Emails viewer that I built. AI-powered coding has greatly increased the speed at which I can build a website or contextualize public data on a map. I think our discourse could be better for it.

To that end, I am working on a few data projects already about the latest release of Census data, the length of City Council meetings, and one I’m sharing here: a public map for the state alcohol tax by venue, which helps you answer some of life’s most persistent questions such as, “who sells more booze, Round-Up Saloon or Nick & Sam’s?”

Also, I am hoping to do a little more real “journalism” than just policy and opinion writing. That means meeting with real people (read: possibly you) with their own side of the story, reaching out to councilmembers or other players for comment (it still sounds so fancy and official), and even maybe trying to break a little news here and there.

What I wrote a few months back still holds: I’m not trying to be right. I’m trying to be honest, and I’m trying to be worth arguing with. Shorter articles, more data, more weight over volume. I hope it’s all in service of that goal.

To everyone who has read, shared, and reached out to me over the last three months, you are the reason I did this for more than a week or two. Thank you.

One more thing, now that I am writing under my real name, I will be able to write for other more-official outlets. I hope I’m not betraying any trust by saying you will likely get to read bits of my writing in D Magazine at some point this year (Sorry, Tim.)

I am aiming among other things, for those to be a little funnier than the ground I’ve tread on here thus far. Y’all will get to be the judge of that.

As always, love, hate or other to Kirk Presley at onemansdallas@gmail.com