In the world of Texas journalism, the Dallas Morning News
is an anomaly, a newspaper born as a satellite publication
in a gamble on future economic and population growth.
Its unlikely appearance on the barren North Texas landscape was the single greatest predictor of steady and robust
growth of the metropolitan area.
The Morning News was founded in 1885 as an expansion outpost of The Galveston News, which began publishing in 1842 and had become the most powerful newspaper
in the state. A charter member of the Associated Press,
the Galveston paper was one of the first to use rotary web
presses and statewide rail distribution.
The idea of growing a satellite newspaper was initiated
by Alfred Horatio Belo, who had become majority owner
of the Galveston paper in 1865, succeeding longtime publisher Willard Richardson. In 1882, Belo sent associate
George B. Dealey to North Texas, where he scouted locations in Waco, Fort Worth, Sherman, and Dallas, which had
become the fifth largest city in the state with a population
of ten thousand.
Several dailies were publishing at the time, but Dealey
gathered $25,000 in stock subscriptions from local businessmen eager to import the prestige of the flagship Galveston
News. Belo named Dealey publisher, setting the stage for a
rapid swing of publishing influence from the Texas coast to
the thriving commercial district on the Trinity River.
When Belo established his publishing outpost, Texas
was considered a strong Dixie state, a post-Civil War territory mired in “the South’s defeatist moonlight-and magnolia nostalgia.” Belo, Dealey and their Dallas investors knew
that moving the state into modernization would require
northern business strategies. The Morning News was a
catalyst for helping the state transcend its regional frontier
identity to become a gateway to the west.
The Morning News was a booster paper, one that “encouraged growth, business expansion, and civic improvements.”
It took its role as moral and social guardian very seriously,
aggressively fighting the Ku Klux Klan and promoting the
benefits of peace and prosperity on the nation’s southern
border. The paper campaigned against gambling, prize
fighting, and legalized prostitution while pushing a local
agenda that included improved municipal and health services, civic involvement, and agriculture diversification.
During the early decades of the twentieth century, the
Morning News was an icon of progressive economic and
technological growth. In 1922, it established one of the
nation’s first radio stations with the founding of WFAA
(Working for All Alike), which became the first 50,000-
watt clear channel station in the Southwest in the 1930s.
Dealey’s son, Walter, obtained the first broadcast license in
Texas, saying, “If we put in a sending station now, it will be
comparable to when the Galveston Daily News established
a branch paper in Dallas. Back then the idea was to ship
the news by wire. The time has come to ship the news by
wireless.”
In 1991, after more than one hundred years of publication, the Morning News purchased and closed its remaining rival, The Dallas Times Herald, and became the paper
with monopoly power in the Dallas market. Since 1986, the
newspaper has won eight Pulitzer Prizes.
Further Reading
Acheson, Sam. Dallas Yesterday, Dallas: Southern Methodist
University Press, 1977.
——. 35,000 Days in Texas: A History of the Dallas News and Its
Forebears, New York: Macmillan, 1938.
Cox, Patrick. The First Texas News Barons, Austin: University of
Texas Press, 2005.
Sharpe, Earnest. G.B. Dealey of the Dallas News, New York:
Henry Holt, 1955.
Thometz, Carol Estes. The Decision-Makers: The Power Structure of Dallas, Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press,
1963.
Frederick R. Blevens