By late spring, acquisition discussions between executives at DallasNews Corporation — the former holding company of The Dallas Morning News and the creative marketing agency Medium Giant — and the global media corporation Hearst Corporation had progressed enough that the North Texas company was ready to open up its financial architecture.
But the talks remained highly sensitive. So instead of directing an entire team to take on the financial transparency job, as public companies typically do, Katy Murray, the company’s president and longtime CFO, decided to take on the job herself.
She spent months compiling reams of highly detailed company records — everything from historical HR files and subscription records to legal liabilities — in a secure electronic data room.
“It is unheard of that a single executive populates a data room, but it shows you she can do the work of eight people,” said Dallas Morning News publisher and president Grant Moise.
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“She just said, ‘Let me carry the burden. I’ll carry the work and I’ll carry the emotional burden’ … I mean, that’s pretty rare.”
In late September, the deal to sell DallasNews Corporation to Hearst was finalized after shareholders approved a purchase agreement that valued the North Texas company at around $88 million. It was a transaction with major implications for Texas media: The sale — the first in the 140-year history of The News — was conceived to preserve the newspaper’s longtime health in an increasingly challenging era for American print media, and effectively represents a new era for one of the country’s most storied news organizations.
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The sale also led to a new chapter for Murray, who has held top executive roles at DallasNews Corporation and its predecessor company A. H. Belo Corporation for the past decade. Under the new ownership structure, several local executive roles, including Murray’s position as president, are being eliminated, and a significant portion of The News’ back office responsibilities are moving to Hearst’s headquarters in New York.
“This year was a big year,” Murray said. And with the landmark deal she helped orchestrate in the rearview mirror, she’s proud of the future she’s helped create for the company, she said — even if it’s also brought difficult restructuring moves and the end of her own tenure.
“The most important thing out of all of this,” she said, “was The Dallas Morning News.”
Fresh eyes, easy rapport
Murray came to North Texas’ largest media company as an outsider. She grew up mostly in Shreveport, La., and attended LSU, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in accounting before taking roles at firms in Dallas and New York. (Yes, she remains a diehard Tigers fan: “If there’s any man who thinks he knows more about college football than Katy Murray,” Moise said, “they better try again.”)
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By 2015, she’d served in CFO roles at public and private companies in the software, finance and tech industries, built teams and closed nine-figure financing rounds. But she’d never worked in media, a notoriously difficult business facing a range of systemic challenges. When a recruiter contacted her about a CFO opening at what was then A.H. Belo Corporation, she said, it wasn’t the industry so much as the newspaper that drew her in.
“I was just like, ‘Wow, this is amazing,'” Murray recalled. “The Dallas Morning News’ reputation, the civic engagement, the journalism — all of it was just something that really meant a lot to me.”
Her impact was immediate. Murray’s outsider background led her to ask probing questions and relentlessly examine the company’s operations.
Less than a year into her tenure, she helped persuade top leadership that it was in the company’s best interest to cut certain non-core, financially struggling products, including the fashion and style magazine FD. In 2018, the relatively new CFO was also involved in the decision to shutter Crowdsource, an events division the company launched several years earlier.
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Those streamlining moves brought their own difficult consequences. In hindsight, Moise said, they were the right long-term decisions, enabling the newspaper to better allocate resources to help weather a particularly turbulent financial period.
“This also shows you the gift of Katy Murray,” Moise said. “The gift of Katy Murray is, she’s so thoughtful as a human being that no one was offended by the hard questions. She’s an extremely considerate person, and she earns trust and gains trust with colleagues really quickly.”
“She was asking so many smart questions,” Moise added, “that finally everybody’s like, ‘I get it. No, we should shut it down.'”
Deep involvement, major milestones
In 2020, after five years as CFO and senior vice president, Murray was promoted to executive vice president.
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Two years later, amid a slew of executive changes and on the heels of the pandemic — perhaps the company’s biggest stress test in decades, when the paper pursued a strategy of swallowing operating losses as it pushed for more revenue from digital subscriptions — she was promoted to her current role as president.
It’s a rise that translated into an ever-expanding suite of responsibilities — along with CFO duties, Murray has taken on IT, human resources, product development and strategy, analytics, print production and legal responsibilities — and led to close interactions across departments.
Through it all, in her own description, Murray has established herself as a collaborative executive who leads by example and empowers and celebrates her employees.
She’s also earned high praise from top company brass for what they describe as her exceedingly rare combination of business acumen, drive, emotional intelligence and civic purpose.
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“Katy has high standards, high expectations of her own self and is intense. She knows how to make things happen,” said Robert Decherd, DallasNews Corporation’s former CEO and majority shareholder.
“But doing it in a balanced way. I mean, there are thousands of examples of corporate and business executives who are intense and basically are too hard on themselves and their organization. That’s not Katy. It’s the opposite.”
Moise has his own metaphor. “She’s a Swiss Army knife of talent,” he said. “What makes Katy so unique is the breadth of her skillset. She was a CFO who had so many more skills to where she just rightfully became the president of the company.”
And despite coming from outside journalism, Murray wholeheartedly embraced the company’s community-minded ethos, Decherd said — and often used her formidable relationship skills to serve as a key bridge between the newspaper and external partners.
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She’s long been heavily involved in community issues. Murray has served on the board of the economic development nonprofit Downtown Dallas, Inc. since 2016, including as board chair the past three years.
“Katy has been kind of our ride or die,” said Jennifer Scripps, the group’s president and CEO, “and she brings, at least for me, just this real cool, calm and collected approach. And she’s been extremely accessible, which I am sometimes amazed at.”
At SPCA of Texas, the Dallas-based animal shelter where Murray served on the board from 2014 through 2022, including three years as board chair — she also co-chaired the group’s signature Fur Ball fundraising gala. Murray has infused the organization with both a high-level sense of community engagement and invaluable financial discipline, said president and CEO Chris Luna.
“They say that a good board member needs to bring three things: time, talent and treasure,” Luna said. “And by that standard Katy was an exceptional board member.” (Murray, who has three adopted cats and a French bulldog, is a passionate animal lover who seeks out animal experiences in far-flung locations. “I believe they have souls,” she said. “I think we need them as much as they need us.”)
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Her tenure at DallasNews Corporation brought numerous company milestones. Several years ago, as company leaders began exploring a move from the newspaper’s longtime home at 508 Young St., it was Murray who worked with real estate brokers and architects to identify the paper’s new location at the former main Dallas Public Library, negotiated the lease with the project developer and helped steer the vacant building’s renovation into a modern, better-sized newspaper office.
Murray then led the sale of the “Rock of Truth” building to local developer Ray Washburne, which closed in 2019 for $28 million.
The deal “saved your company,” Washburne said. The transaction was complicated, the developer added, but Murray proved to be a knowledgeable real estate operator and genial business partner. “I hadn’t met her before. And we came out of it as friends.”
Murray also led the company’s protracted negotiations with The News’ Guild, which culminated in 2023 with the newspaper’s first-ever union contract, and drove DallasNews Corporation’s $44 million sale of its 620,000-square-foot Plano printing plant to the golf cart manufacturer Denago EV.
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That deal, which closed in March, enabled the company to settle its $16 million pension liability — effectively laying the groundwork for the Hearst deal.
“We knew the partner that we wanted,” Murray said of The News’ new parent company. “We knew the partner that had the same journalistic values, the same values in general. Integrity, focus on the consumer and the subscriber and the customers.”
Critically, Hearst — a privately-held company whose portfolio includes financial services, software and medical information businesses, stakes in major cable television networks and dozens of print media properties, including all of Texas’ major daily newspapers — also has the financial resources to ensure a bright future for The News, Murray added.
Murray’s last day with the company will be Jan. 2. She’s considering various professional options, she said, including potential public company or board roles. She expects to be busy.
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“I’m going to take a little time off to think about my professional options,” she said.
“Whether it is a role with a public or private company or a board role, I am very excited about the future and the next chapter of my career.”
Read more on The Dallas Morning News
