Jim Mitchell, longtime member of The Dallas Morning News editorial board, died quietly in home hospice care in Carrollton on Tuesday morning from prostate cancer. He was 71.
He retired earlier this year as senior editorial writer due to his health issues — having spent 41 years at The News, starting as a business news reporter in 1984 before moving to the editorial board in 1998.
“Jim was a man of deep conscience and empathy and someone devoted to practicing journalism the right way,” said Editorial Page editor Rudy Bush. “His intellect, curiosity and just all around decency helped shape this newspaper’s perspective for decades. He is greatly missed.”
The News was his extended family, and he was devoted to it.
“Jim’s four decades at the paper showed just how dedicated an employee he was,” said Keven Ann Willey, who headed the editorial board for nearly 16 years until February 2018. “Day in and day out, Jim was always the first one in the office.”
She noticed after her second year at the paper that Mitchell hadn’t put in for any vacation. “I said, ‘You have to take a vacation or I’m going to assign you one.’ He was such a Steady Eddie.”
Mitchell graduated from Loyola University and earned a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University. His first job out of college was at the Times-Union in Rochester, N.Y.
Jim Memmott, currently a columnist for Gannett, met Mitchell when Memmott signed on at the Times-Union in 1980.
“His desk was beside mine, and he was a welcoming colleague,” Memmott recalled. “He’d been told that it was a good idea to read your stories aloud before sending them off to the editors. That helped in catching glitches.
“So Jim would read what he’d written, always in a quiet, soft voice. And, inevitably, I would think he was talking to me. ‘What, Jim?’ I would ask. I’d say it again until he, or I realized what was going on.”
Memmott overheard Mitchell’s one-sided interview with the widow for an obit he was writing. Mitchell repeated her answers for her husband’s hobbies: Kodak Pioneer Club and bowling.
“Finally, Jim recounted to me afterward, the widow told him, ‘I guess he was kind of dull.’ I don’t know if Jim used that quote. He was a good guy.”
Mitchell’s second job out of college was with The Dallas Morning News.
“Jim was on the vanguard of a new era of business reporter that emerged in the 1980s,” said Bob Mong, who, as assistant managing editor over Business News, recruited Mitchell. “He was well equipped to handle any business story because he was so well trained. His colleagues, the companies he covered and his readers appreciated his precision and skill.”
At the time, The News was rapidly expanding its business coverage as one of its competitive strongholds against the Dallas Times Herald.
The executive director of Columbia University’s Knight-Bagehot Fellowship in Economics and Business Journalism program told Mong that Mitchell was worthy of keeping an eye on.
“Maria Halkias [a Business News hire in 1983] begged me not to pick Jim up at DFW in my 1977 maroon Plymouth Volare, saying, ‘We know how you like to personally pick up recruits, but your car does not impress.’ ”
She brought Mitchell downtown from the airport, and they’ve been close friends ever since.
“Jim loved the newspaper, and we all felt like family,” said Halkias, who retired from The News’ in June 2024, after 41 years on the Business news staff. “I met Jim in 1983 at a University of Missouri summer fellowship, and a few months later, Cheryl Hall hired us.
“With our common Chicagoland backgrounds, together we discovered that Texas chili has no beans and TexMex food was amazing.”
Coming to Dallas in 1984 took courage. Mitchell had been warned against moving here by his mother, who told him quite seriously: “They shoot Black people in Dallas.”
He was cautious at first, but easily assimilated into Dallas life.
During Mitchell’s business news days, the ever-growing department was a tightly knit staff of mostly 20-somethings with me as the 30-something editor.
Mitchell was a notorious pack rat but with a remarkable mental filing system. I once challenged him to find a report somewhere in a two-foot, leaning stack of files and newspapers on his desk. He reached into the middle of it and pulled out the report.
I never asked him to clean up his desk again.
Willey says Mitchell’s desk didn’t get any tidier in the pristine environment of the editorial department.
“Whenever I went into his office to talk to him, I had to clear off a corner of a chair just to have room to sit down. But miraculously, whenever I asked him for something or a document, he was able to pull it out almost instantaneously. I marveled at it, but never figured out how he did that.”
Jim and Verna, his wife of 34 years, met playing softball. Jim liked what he saw — in more ways than one — and recruited her to play on The Dallas Morning News softball team. They have a 29-year-old son, Matt, who lives in Carrollton.
“We are unbelievable grateful that The Dallas Morning News has been so supportive of us and continues to do so,“ said Verna Mitchell. ”Jim considered everyone his family, and they’ve been that for Matt and me, too. He thought of himself as being very blessed for having such close friends. The Morning News was more than an employer.”
He considered meeting Nelson Mandela in South Africa to be his most unforgettable career moment. But he’d also tell you that the birth of Matthew ranked right up there in his personal life.
“Jim was of special value to the editorial department,” Willey said, “because he had great connections within the business community. Plus, he was a founding member of our 10-year editorial push to lift up southern Dallas.”
Mitchell was not one to publicly display his emotions. So Willey was caught slightly off guard when he gave her a bear hug on her last day at The News seven years ago. Both had tears in their eyes.
“I think it surprised both of us,” she said. “I was touched. Jim was a quiet force at The Dallas Morning News. The newspaper will be worse off without him.”
Jim Mitchell is survived by his wife Verna and son Matthew.
