The Bottom Line - A visual study of Texas social services

Dallas Morning News staff photographer Mona Reeder came up with the idea of The Bottom Line to expose the frayed social safety net in Texas through photos and audio. A local activist showed her a list of Texas state rankings in the area of social services, almost all in the bottom five in the U.S. We started talking about the idea and went from there. I came up with a working outline and we held numerous brainstorming sessions based on Mona’s research. Therefore, she went into the field with a basic plan of attack.

The idea and execution came completely from our photo department, not unusual for The Dallas Morning News. Mona and I felt strongly that we did not want to bog down the project with long stories and complicated statistics. The simple combination of images and the actual numbers told a powerful story on their own.

The biggest challenge photographically was to form a coverage plan and stick to it, making adjustments along the way. Mona would go out and shoot for a week, we would sit down and look at every frame & then decide where to go from there. Basically, we were trying to tell a lot of stories at the same time. And tell them in a way that made sense.

Our Points section, the Sunday editorial pages, offered us eight pages to print the project, which was designed by DMN photo editor Brad Loper. Response was overwhelming, Mona received hundreds & hundreds of emails and letters from readers. The project was also a 2008 Pulitzer Prize finalist and won virtually every other award you can win for a photo project.

Here's the project as it was published in print. Click here to see the online version of The Bottom Line.