Restaurant Critic Jobs (NOW HIRING)

Summary: North Texas is one of the most exciting food scenes in the country and The Dallas Morning News is looking for an editor who\'s as obsessed with covering it as our audience is with consuming it. This is one of the most-read, most-engaged beats in our newsroom — and we\'re just getting started. We\'re growing fast with digital stories, social video and our popular Eat Drink D-FW podcast, and we\'ve kicked off a series of top restaurant guides that our audience is already devouring. This is just the start. We need a leader who\'s ready to make all of it happen. This is a role for someone who thinks big, moves fast and genuinely loves food culture, not just what\'s on the plate, but the people, places and stories behind it. If you\'re the kind of editor who can inspire a team, spot a great story and understand what keeps an audience coming back for more, we want to hear from you.

Job description: You\'ll lead a talented, well-sourced team of two food reporters, a restaurant critic and a food digital producer, all of whom bring serious energy to everything they do. You\'ll direct the digital producer to build new audiences and find creative ways to tell stories on emerging platforms.

You\'re a strategic thinker who knows how to balance the fast pace of breaking news with the patience and vision that great enterprise storytelling requires. You\'re fluent in analytics, plugged into audience behavior and always thinking about what will resonate and why.

This is a deeply collaborative role. Beyond leading your team, you\'ll work closely with our Audience, Audiovisual, Product and Marketing teams to drive everything from the weekly Eat Drink D-FW podcast to newsletters, news alerts, social media and the launch of our top restaurant guides. If you thrive at the intersection of content and strategy, you\'ll feel right at home.

You\'re also a people-first leader, someone who invests in the growth of the journalists you supervise and is genuinely committed to diverse hiring, sourcing and coverage that reflects the full richness of North Texas.

• Lead and manage a team of two food reporters, a restaurant critic and a digital producer, setting priorities and providing hands-on coaching to help each person grow.
• Oversee strategy for food coverage, including assigning and editing stories for digital and print, managing newsletters and monitoring metrics to identify opportunities for growth
• Use analytics to make informed decisions about story timing, placement and audience engagement, and share those insights with your team
• Work with editors to ensure stories are publication-ready with strong visuals and compelling presentation
• Coordinate with our social media, audience and photo teams to maximize the reach and impact of coverage
• Help plan coverage strategies for major events, breaking news and enterprise projects across digital and print
• Assist with planning and coordinating video and audio projects, including the weekly Eat Drink D-FW podcast
• Lead the next phase of our top restaurant dining guides series, growing it into a must-read franchise that keeps our audience coming back for more.
• Responsible for all aspects of employee management, including recruitment, interviewing, selection, onboarding and retention
• Conduct regular performance evaluations; provide constructive feedback and coaching to support employee development and accountability
• Administer progressive discipline and counseling as needed, in alignment with company policies and procedures
• Oversee scheduling, workload distribution and delegation of responsibilities to ensure balanced team performance and productivity

• A bachelor\'s degree in journalism or a related field and at least five years of experience
• Exceptional news judgment, accuracy and core journalism skills, including a flair for headlines and a sharp editorial eye
• A genuine passion for food culture that informs smart, impactful coverage
• Strong ability to edit everything from quick-turn breaking news to in-depth enterprise stories
• Fluency in audience analytics and the ability to translate data insights into newsgathering decisions
• Expertise in multi-platform digital content strategy across desktop, mobile, social and emerging platforms
• Strong planning and organizational skills with keen attention to detail
• A collaborative, people-first approach to coaching and developing journalists
• An excellent communicator who thrives under deadline pressure and works well across diverse teams
• Creative, forward-thinking mindset aligned with our growth goals

Our state-of-the-art AI tools, including ChatGPT Enterprise as well as the many Hearst DevHub-built tools, act as a smart assistant for routine work. In our newsroom, you will use AI to:

• Generate headline options, SEO keywords or alert language
• Clean up grammar, apply style and improve clarity
• Version stories for different formats (video, audio) or platforms (social media)
• Monitor public meetings and get alerts with transcripts and video
• AI-assisted data processing and summarization, human-verified before use

Advanced AI is not a journalist, but it can facilitate and accelerate the work of journalism.

Exclusive Partnership with OpenAI

Through our strategic content partnership with OpenAI and our exclusive ChatGPT Enterprise license, we have unparalleled access to the latest advancements in AI technology.

About the Hearst DevHub

A key segment of our editorial innovation team is the AI group, which works on developing ambitious, reader-facing experiments and projects with accuracy as a core metric.

About The Dallas Morning News:

Since 1885, The Dallas Morning News (www.dallasnews.com) has been North Texas’ trusted source for credible, independent journalism — reporting with accuracy, fairness, and integrity. Each week, we reach more than 4 million people across print, digital, and social platforms, covering the stories that shape life in Dallas and across the state. From politics and public policy to business, culture, and sports, our mission is to inform, engage, and reflect the diverse communities we serve.

About Hearst Newspapers:

With 2,500 employees across the nation, HNP represents a network of 24 daily and 52 weekly publications, including the San Francisco Chronicle, Houston Chronicle, Dallas Morning News, San Antonio Express-News and Albany Times Union, several top digital-only news and lifestyle sites, marketing services businesses, and entertainment businesses such as King Features Syndicate.

At HNP, we are investing in new and innovative ways to tell stories — growing newsrooms, diversifying tools, evolving platforms — to support the millions of people who trust us each month to help them make decisions, take action and be inspired.

Be a part of something bigger – Your Headline Awaits.