Morning News employees aren’t the only ink-stained folk in Dallas who are unsure where they’ll be working in the coming months. Today comes news that Spirit, the inflight of Southwest Airlines, will no longer be published in Dallas (or Fort Worth, actually). More, for Those Who Care:
In an odd arrangement, American Airlines heretofore had published Spirit under a contract with Southwest. That contract recently came up for bid. And it was a big contract, as Spirit was the fastest-growing magazine in the country in 2005 and a veritable cash-printing machine for American (which had been publishing the title under a sweetheart of a contract). Naturally, we were one of the companies that bid for the gig. We made it to the last round. So did American Airlines Publishing and Emmis Communications (parent of Texas Monthly).
But your winner is Pace Communications, which also publishes Delta’s Sky, US Airways’ creatively named US Airways, and United’s Hemispheres. A recent Washington Post article graded Pace’s other inflights, giving them, respectively, an “A-,” a “C-,” and a “C.”
Spirit, at the time, got the only “A.” Media observers in North Texas will see if that grade holds.
Meanwhile, what of the American-employed Spirit staffers? Will Pace move the magazine to North Carolina and hire them all? Will Pace open a Dallas office? Will the Spirit folk and the News folk all join forces and go work at ENVY? As they say, developing.
