Gilbert Bailón has returned to Texas for a new job as executive editor at KERA, an NPR member station in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
KERA is the lead station of The Texas Newsroom, a journalism collaborative between NPR and the public radio stations of Texas.
Bailón starts his new role today.
He is tasked with guiding KERA’s growing newsroom, which recently launched a new government accountability reporting team dedicated to holding local and regional officials accountable for the decisions they make and is also expanding local and regional partnerships, including collaborations with The Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Report.
Bailón was most recently the editor-in-chief of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, where he oversaw coverage of the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and the social unrest that followed. The Post-Dispatch won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography and was a Pulitzer finalist for editorial writing for that coverage.
Before joining the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 2007, he spent 21 years at The Dallas Morning News in various roles, starting out as a reporter. He rose up the ranks to executive editor of the paper in 1998 until 2003, when he launched Spanish-language sister publication Al Día, becoming its founding editor and publisher.
Earlier in his career, he worked as a general assignment reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the San Diego Union-Tribune and the Los Angeles Daily News.