Ken Johnson; led Dallas Times Herald; at 74

KEN JOHNSON

DALLAS - Ken Johnson, a former Dallas Times Herald executive editor who transformed the newspaper into a Pulitzer Prize winner, has died. He was 74.

Mr. Johnson, who also held several positions at The Washington Post, died Sunday at UT Southwestern University Hospital in Dallas of a heart infection, family members said.

The Times Mirror Corp. of Los Angeles appointed the 40-year-old Mr. Johnson to the Times Herald helm in 1975. During the next nine years, he helped turn the afternoon daily into a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper. That ignited a ferocious competition with the established morning daily, The Dallas Morning News. It ended only after The News owner Belo Corp. bought the Times Herald and shut it down in December 1991.

Burl Osborne, publisher emeritus of The Dallas Morning News, remembered Mr. Johnson as a competing newspaper executive and friend. "The competition was never personal; it was always professional," said Osborne, who came to The News in 1980. The "executives were able to sit down and have a beer together without getting into a fight and then go back the next day and fight like hell for readers."

Among the journalists hired by the Times Herald under Mr. Johnson were the late columnist Molly Ivins and reporter Bill Keller, now the executive editor of The New York Times.

Mr. Johnson, born in Huntington, W.Va., graduated from high school in Bristol, Tenn., in 1953. He started his career in journalism as a copy boy at the Herald-Courier in Bristol, Va., while attending what is now East Tennessee State University.

In 1960, at the age of 25, he went to work for The Savannah Morning News and became managing editor six months later.

In 1965, he moved to Washington, D.C., where he was an assistant for a year to US Representative G. Elliot Hogan, Democrat of Georgia.

Mr. Johnson moved to Dallas in 1975 and stayed at the Times Herald until 1984. Two years later, he and Will D. Jarrett founded Westward Communications.