DALLAS MORNING NEWS
The
Dallas Morning News traces its roots to
the thriving port city of Galveston, where in
1842 Samuel Bangs, a publisher from Boston,
founded the Galveston News. After the Civil
War, a Confederate colonel from North Carolina
named A. H. Belo joined the Galveston News as bookkeeper. Belo quickly became a
full partner, and the newspaper became the
foundation of the A. H. Belo Corporation,
now one of the largest diversified media companies
in the United States.
In 1885 Belo told his mailroom manager,
George Bannerman Dealey, to find a place in
North Texas to start a sister publication. Dealey
chose the small town of Dallas and named the
newspaper the
Dallas Morning News. When the
Dallas Morning News was launched in 1885, its
most serious challenge came from the far-off St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which had a greater circulation
in Texas than any Texas newspaper. To meet
this threat, the Dallas Morning News used a special
train to deliver copies to McKinney, Sherman,
Denison, and other towns in North and
East Texas. It also used trains to deliver copies to
Fort Worth to the west.
By 1906, the year the predecessor of the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram began publication, the
Dallas Morning News had reached a circulation
of 38,000, and Dallas was soon to be
the major city in North Texas. An often-bitter
rivalry developed between Dallas and Fort
Worth. Dallas was becoming a sophisticated
metropolitan center, while Fort Worth remained
a cow town and proudly identified
itself as "Where the West Begins." While it had
some circulation in the Fort Worth area, the
Dallas Morning News concentrated most of its
circulation efforts in the city of Dallas and
cities in the northern and eastern regions of
Texas. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, looking
westward, became the newspaper for all of
West Texas and into New Mexico.
An almost impenetrable wall grew up along
the boundary line that separates Dallas County
and Tarrant County, where Fort Worth is located.
For most of the twentieth century, the
Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram respected that boundary, and other
than single-copy newsstand sales, each stayed
on its own side of the county line. However, by
the 1960s the thirty-mile-wide rural area between
Dallas and Fort Worth began to explode
in industry and population. Arlington grew
almost overnight from 7,500 to more than
300,000. Several other cities in the former noman's-
land had exceeded 100,000 by the end of
the twentieth century. This led to a major circulation
war between the Dallas Morning News
and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Both coveted
the rapidly expanding population as possible
subscribers and readers. In the 1990s both
newspapers established Arlington editions
that grew into the Arlington Morning News and
the Arlington Star-Telegram. The circulation
battle also includes the area to the north of
Arlington known as the Mid-Cities. Most of
this disputed territory is in Tarrant County.
Although the
Dallas Morning News has become
one of the largest newspapers in the
country and now competes for the Plains border
country to the west, it has never approached
the influence of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in the West Texas and eastern New
Mexico portions of the Great Plains.
Gerald L. Grotta
Texas Christian University