DALLAS — Inside his small recording studio in a Dallas high-rise, Royce Williams put on his headset to start recording his latest interview with a DFW community leader, before going to film his high school’s football game up the road. Williams is an audio-visual teacher by day and news anchor by night.

“Broadcasting is my passion and I knew I always wanted to be that Walter Cronkite, but the younger version,” said Williams with a laugh.

Williams said he went to school for broadcast journalism back in the day, and was inspired by listening to local news and gospel radio in his parents' car growing up. Eventually he shifted his passion to teaching and now works as a teacher in Duncanville.

Throughout the years, Williams has continued to use his journalism skills by running his social media news operation, DFW Live News, on the side. However, as the pandemic carried on for months, Williams began putting more effort into his show, after he saw a need in his community to tell more stories and to get factual information to people.

“I wanted to do something to discover North Texas in a unique way,” he said. “It was that hunger; I was hungry to make the community better.”

He’s rebranding his show as "DFW Live," and starting a regular, internet radio broadcast to interview people in the community and cover subjects throughout DFW. Most of all, though, he said he wants to do so using his knowledge of broadcasting to try and bring a more factual, complete program to local online news offerings.

That’s something that can be tricky to find in the growing world of citizen journalism. Brian Cross, social media expert at Elasticity,  said that term is really used to fit a wide variety of people using social media and the internet to present information and current events to their online following. Unfortunately, he said that’s often a hit-or-miss prospect when it comes to facts. 

“They’re grabbing a little nugget of what they want and then they put their spin to it, add some conspiracy theory or something they heard from ‘Uncle Bob’ at the Thanksgiving table and then they put that together, package it and put it out there,” said Cross.

It comes at a time when trust in journalists, both traditional and new, are questioned by many. Cross feels many of the citizen journalists of today may be doing what they’re doing as an answer to that, and as their attempt to present what is, in their view, a better option. However, that space is often just filled with opinions rather than facts.

“Maybe there’s better ways to reform the system than being just another voice out there and just murky-ing the waters,” said Cross.

Cross said he believes things really can’t get much more difficult to navigate at this point, but he believes at some point things will have to level out; something he already sees starting with social media companies better vetting claims by “citizen journalists” and adding disclaimers to those they find presenting false or skewed information.

Williams hopes he can pass along some better standards as well. Though he’s probably moved beyond what many would classify as citizen journalism, the teacher said part of his new expansion of DFW Live is to help guide his journalism and broadcast-focused students to ethical, fact-based practices rather than questionable ones.

“There’s so much happening right now, but you want to get that real information that no one else is getting,” said Williams. “I’m trying to create a connection.”