Who’s Winning the Newspaper Race?

Circulation competition between the Dallas News and the Times Herald is downright low-keyed these days. Gone are the hard fought media battles of two years ago in which the Herald portrayed itself as a speedy hare and the News as a slow-moving tortoise. The News responded by caricaturing the Herald as a nitwitted, flop-eared bunny named Harold Hare. Now all the Herald does is claim it “gives you more than the News.”

Strangely enough, the issue which started the cartoon campaigns is now settled, at least temporarily, in the Herald’s favor, though little is said about it. The Herald now leads the News in total Sunday circulation, as it did for the first three months of 1974, a claim which ignited the local advertising war. Undoubtedly part of the reason the Herald leads on Sunday, by a narrow 2,022 copy margin, is that the Herald offers both the Sunday paper and the Saturday Herald for $1.75 a month, the same price which the News charges to deliver only the Sunday paper.

Here’s what the most recent circuia-tion figures show. On Sunday, the Herald leads in total circulation, 320,727 to 318,705. In Dallas County alone the Herald’s Sunday margin is quite wide, 256,047 to 212,392. The Herald also holds a slight edge in Dallas County weekday circulation.

The News, which circulates much further out in the boonies than does the Herald, has the larger Monday-through-Friday circulation, 261,859 to 228,572, when all of the outlying areas are considered.

Dallas-Fort Worth residents seem to be heavier newspaper subscribers than people in other major cities. In a survey prepared for Sales & Marketing Management Magazine, data show that 71 percent of Dallas-Fort Worth households subscribe to a major metropolitan newspaper, while in Houston, for instance, the figure is much lower – 60 percent.