jtstang wrote:MrMustang1965 wrote:CalallenStang wrote:In case you didn't know, inside the Umphrey Lee Center here on the Hilltop is the Belo Journalism Complex...
Yeah, I knew that.
I long for the days of a two-newspaper town again.
The Dallas Times Herald put the DMN to shame.
That explains why it did so well...
from
www.wikipedia.org
The Dallas Times Herald won three Pulitzer Prizes, all for photography, and two George Polk Awards, for local and regional reporting. As an afternoon publication for most of its 103 years, its demise was hastened by the shift of newspaper reading habits to morning papers, as well as the loss of an antitrust lawsuit against crosstown rival
The Dallas Morning News.
In late 1991, the "DMN" became the lone major newspaper in the Dallas market, when its rival
The Dallas Times Herald was closed after several years of hard-fought circulation wars between the two papers, especially over the then-burgeoning classified advertising market. In July of 1986, the
Times Herald was purchased by a fledgling newspaper empresario, the now-controversial William Dean Singleton. After 18 months of tepid efforts to turn the paper around, Singleton sold it to an associate, and on 8 December 1991, Belo Corp bought the
Times Herald for $55 million, closing the paper the next day.
The fact that Singleton had begun his newspaper career at the
Morning News in the 1970s fueled speculation that they had been behind the entire sale and closure of their rival paper. While the
News obviously stood to benefit, no evidence was ever proffered of behavior outside the bounds of the admittedly-rough newspaper trade.
The Dallas Morning News has had an ongoing problem with its circulation numbers, being accused of inflating them to keep advertiser revenue high. In the mid-1980s, the paper was sued by the rival
Times Herald, charging that the
News was overstating circulation increases. In 2004, long after the
Times Herald had ceased printing,
The Dallas Morning News admitted it had indeed underreported circulation decreases, overstating Sunday circulation by 11.9% and daily circulation by 5.1%.
The Morning News promised to pay advertisers US$23 million in restitution. The circulation problems worsened parent company Belo's financial condition and in late 2004, Belo laid off 250 workers, including 150 at the
Morning News. Two years later,
The News offered a voluntary severance package that more than 100 staffers took.
Some prominent former staff members from The Dallas Times Herald:
Joe Bob Briggs, syndicated film critic, writer, and actor
Molly Ivins, syndicated columnist
Jim Lehrer, author and anchor of The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS who was a Times Herald reporter at the time of the Kennedy Assassination in Dallas
Skip Bayless, sports columnist, current ESPN analyst and co-host of Cold Pizza on ESPN2
Mickey Spagnola, writer for DallasCowboys.com
Lee Cullum, NPR and PBS commentator, columnist, and producer and host for KERA Television
Posted: Sat Sep 08, 2007 1:03 am