Dallas Paper And Fort Worth Paper Get Married

   DallasBasketball.com broke the story back on July 28: The Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, venerable institutions, community backbones and long-time rivals, would be combining forces and blowing off so-called “important’’ sports beats.

   Well, now – almost six months later – the local papers are reporting reports on themselves. And an example of how this will work is that newspaper coverage of your Dallas Mavericks will be sliced in half.

  The Morning News reveals (well, not reveals, inasmuch as we already revealed it) that the Dallas paper will now cover the Mavs and the Stars and ship its stories to the Fort Worth paper. Meanwhile, the Star-Telegram will cover the Rangers and NASCAR and ship its stuff to the Dallas paper.

   We’ve already address in-depth what it all means. One more quick spin there:

   *The two papers clearly do not regard any of these as “major’’ beats. Because when it comes to the Cowboys, both outlets will continue their own coverage. That sends an obvious message not only to those teams, but to their information-hungry fans.

  *“Sharing’’ is an excellent teaching tool in preschool. And it is obviously a shot at survival. It is not, however, the way to increase quality of coverage or quantity of readership.

  *In the only snarky comment we’re going to make on this – because we are nothing but saddened by the papers’ admissions here, which of course will arrive with continuing layoffs – we will note that if a little ol’ website like DB.com is breaking the news about the Dallas paper and the Fort Worth paper before the Dallas paper and the Fort Worth paper can break it, well, maybe that is somehow symptomatic.

  *Mark Cuban may be onto something when he suggests pro sports itself help to supplement and guide newspaper beat coverage. (Pictured, courtesy of our man Danny Bollinger, is Cuban from 2001, practicing the time-tested tradition of rifling through the morning papers.) It goes against conventional wisdom, but at this point, the newspaper industry – at least in Dallas and Fort Worth – ought to be wide-open to suggestions.

   UPDATE at 9:27am, Jan 13: The papers' announcements do not include the plans for NASCAR coverage. We were told in July that the S-T would take responsibility for stories from the Texas Motor Speedway, and we still see that as likely. We're assuming it wasn't mentioned for the same reason TCU and SMU weren't mentioned -- because it is thought of as "minor.''

611pm jan 12 2009