Shootout in the Big D

By Janice Castro

Two once drowsy Texas dailies blaze away, and both benefit

Few American cities nowadays can boast two thriving newspapers. As a result, old-fashioned journalistic competition is practically a thing of the past. Gone are the days when rival dailies would scramble to beat one another on every story, raid newsrooms across the land for talent, open new out-of-town bureaus like bottles of beer, and in the process keep getting livelier and better.

Dallas is a notable exception to that woeful rule. There, a Texas-style shoot-out is being staged by two local papers: the deeply conservative Morning News (daily circ. 283,700), which used to be dismissed as the Morning Snooze, and the Times Herald (daily circ. 243,500), whose sensational coverage once earned it the sobriquet Crimes Herald. Locked in a struggle to become the best in the booming Southwest, both papers are rapidly piling up prizes as well as profits. At the same time they are proving, as the Times Herald put it in a nationwide help-wanted campaign, that "there's more to Dallas than the Cowboys and Who Shot J.R."

The roots of the competition in Dallas (pop. 904,000) can be traced back to 1970, when the second-place Times Herald was acquired by the Times Mirror Co., which counts the Los Angeles Times, Long Island's Newsday and the Denver Post among its string of highly rated papers. The new owners started pumping in money and recruiting new blood from top papers across the country. In 1975 Executive Editor Kenneth Johnson, now 47, a tough West Virginian given to chainsmoking and chewing out reporters, was hired from his job as vice president at the Washington Post to revitalize the paper. His assessment of it at that time: "Provincial. The staff was too small and not aggressive enough. The scope of the coverage was too narrow." Within three years Johnson hired 100 new staffers and eased out dozens of slower-moving veterans (fewer than 50 of the current editorial staff of 203 were there when he arrived); he also started a new morning edition to siphon off some News readers, redesigned the paper to give it a cleaner look, and added new sections on sports, fashion and travel. The Times Herald's editorial budget rose 157% in five years. Johnson switched the Saturday afternoon edition to the morning, and circulation went up 80,000 in two years, to 280,000.

Last year the Morning News began to move. Robert Decherd, now 30, the son of the former chairman of the News's parent company, the A.H. Belo Corp., became the paper's executive vice president. Says Decherd: "We were not going to roll over and turn the market over to the Times Herald." Decherd brought in Associated Press Managing Editor Burl Osborne, now 44, as executive editor and gave him a 25% bigger editorial budget. Osborne, a decisive and resourceful editor, gave the Morning News a new look, packaging national and international news together, and building a hustling business section to serve Dallas' substantial banking and manufacturing community. Once relegated to the back page of the sports section, business stories now frequently run on the front page. Sundays and Tuesdays bring special supplements of 14 pages and more. An analysis of Ford Motor Co.'s deepening financial woes was later confirmed by Business Week and the Wall Street Journal. Reporters specialize in such areas as energy, electronics and entrepreneurship--topics of great interest to Dallas residents. An architecture critic has just signed on.

News bureaus in Mexico City and Washington, D.C., were beefed up. Veteran Baltimore Sun Reporter Carl Leubsdorf, 43, was recruited to head the Washington office seven months ago. The all-new D.C. staff of seven reporters file a broad range of substantial stories, particularly on such Dallas-oriented topics as energy, defense and finance. The bureau produced one of the earliest and sharpest reports in the country on the building right-wing backlash against President Reagan's nomination of Sandra Day O'Connor for the Supreme Court.

The Times Herald has countered with the announcement of seven new outposts in Texas, one in New York City to cover the financial beat, and another in Toronto to report on Canadian energy matters. When Johnson learned that the Morning News was about to steal his top columnist, Jim Henderson, 39, he countered by offering Henderson an unlimited expense account and the title of national correspondent. He also kept a valued Spanish-speaking reporter by creating a new Central American bureau for him. Newsroom wags at the Times Herald satirized this move by tacking up signs over their desks reading BEIRUT BUREAU and ROME DESK.

In fact, reporters from both papers are occasionally sent abroad: a Morning News reporter went to Japan to report on trade barriers; a Times Herald reporter went to the Middle East to report on energy. Some critics charge that much of this out-of-town reporting is aimed more at garnering publicity than gathering news. Replies Johnson: "Texas is the California of 30 years ago. It's a big boom frontier." Adds Decherd: "If you believe excellence creates a successful newspaper, you've got to be prepared to spend what it takes."

So far, the spending seems to have brought results. The Times Herald was awarded a Pulitzer Prize last year for feature photography. Since last June, Morning News stories have been distributed by the New York Times News Service. Meanwhile, as Southern Methodist University Journalism Professor David McHam points out, the rivalry makes a stimulating spectator sport: "One of the fun things is seeing who does best on any given story." Clearly, in a competition like the one between the Morning News and Times Herald, the real winner is the reader.

--By Janice Castro. Reported by Anne Constable/Dallas

With reporting by Anne Constable/Dallas

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.