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A SLEW OF RIVALRIES MAKE THE DALLAS-FT. WORTH MEDIA LANDSCAPE ONE OF THE most competitive in the nation, with Dallas-based Belo Corp. the dominant player. The company's vast resources include market-leading daily The Dallas Morning News; perennial broadcast-TV leader WFAA-TV; 24-hour regional cable news channel Texas Cable News (TXCN); several community newspapers; and a string of locally focused Web sites through its Internet division.
And Belo continues to grow, most recently launching a free commuter tabloid newspaper called Quick. The tide of the Morning News offspring describes the speed with which Belo can move, as the launch comes just two weeks after rival American Consolidated Media of Dallas (former Morning News president Jeremy Halbreich is the company's chairman, president and CEO) announced plans to launch a similar free paper, A.M. Journal Express, on Nov. 12. Belo had had a feature-oriented monthly in the works for some time but shifted gears to go head-to-head with its competitor when the news broke of ACMD's impending launch.
Quick hit town first, launching last Monday with 32 pages and 150,000 copies, followed on Wednesday by A.M. Journal Express, with 24 pages and 140,000 copies. Both papers are trying to emulate the free-daily model that has sprung up in other major-market cities, including Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Boston and New York.
The Morning News' daily circ for the period ended Sept. 30 compared to the same period last year was up fractionally to 510,133 Monday-Thursday and flat Fridays to 586,675. Its Sunday circ was also flat at 785,876.
Moroney says the Morning News has been following a strategic plan for new-product development. Another example is its introduction last March of an edition in Collin County, headquarters of J.C. Penney and Frito Lay. The affluent county's population surged 86 percent between 1990 and 2000. The Morning News has published a zoned edition in Collin County since 1996. The new edition hits seven days a week and integrates Collin County coverage into the regular edition. Circulation for the Collin County edition is about 71,000 daily and about 110,000 Sunday.
Knight Ridder's Fort Worth Star-Telegram is the Morning News' main print competitor. Its Monday-Thursday circ was 215,452 for the period ended Sept. 30, reflecting a 1.6 percent decline from a year ago; its...