The Iowa State Daily and the Ames Daily Tribune are apparently going head to head in a battle for readership among the university’s faculty and staff.

The Tribune distributed Tuesday the first edition of its version of University Times, a separate publication aimed at the Iowa State faculty and staff. The Daily announced early last month that it will put out its own faculty and staff newspaper, also called University Times.

According to documents filed with the Iowa Secretary of State’s Office, both the Daily and the Tribune have trademarked the name, but under different classifications. The Tribune submitted the name Oct. 9 as a print or publication. The Daily filed Oct. 4 under communication.

Tribune officials have used the University Times name off and on for several years as a section in the Business Times, another weekly supplement, Publisher Gary Gerlach said.

“Under prior use and copyright law we have the superior claim. We’re offended here that it’s kind of a cheap attempt to trade on our Business Times product,” Gerlach said. “We think that we’re being imitated here and we think that’s dirty pool.”

Janette Antisdel, general manager of the Daily, said she has made no plans as of yet to change the name of the new Daily publication, set to come out Monday, Nov. 13.

“Right now we still plan to call it University Times, but I’m not sure whether or not we should,” she said. “I don’t want the Daily to be associated with that shopper look.” Antisdel said the Tribune’s University Times contained nearly 80 percent advertising.

The Iowa State Daily Publications Board authorized Antisdel, on a near-unanimous vote, to go ahead with the publication. Board members cited as justification a possible threat to the Daily if the Tribune started a faculty and staff publication on campus.

But, Gerlach said, before the Daily’s plans for a new publication were made public, Tribune officials had taken no steps to heighten their campus coverage.

“We didn’t have any plans to do anything until about a month ago when we read in the Des Moines Register that the Iowa State Daily Board is going to start a professional publication, and it occurred to us that that’s considerably different from the student newspaper’s mandate over the years,” Gerlach said. “It appeared to us that the Daily is starting to become a professional company, run by professional bureaucrats and managers and the traditional student newspaper is no longer confined to the campus.”

Gerlach said by casting the first stone, the Daily opened itself to competition.

“We consider the campus wide open for competition now,” he said.

In addition to University Times, the regular Daily Tribune will include a separate page devoted to university coverage. The page will run daily and some of the information from it will be reworked for University Times.

Tribune officials are planning to hire several people to staff University Times and are looking to develop its distribution system. Gerlach said he will meet with Warren Madden, ISU’s vice president for business and finance, this morning to discuss gaining the same access rights to campus drop sites as the Daily.

“We don’t think that there’s any constitutional way any publication can be barred from the campus under the First Amendment,” Gerlach said. “The university has every right to regulate the time, place and manner of distribution, but every publication needs to be treated equally. On that point we’re prepared to litigate.”

Should a legal battle develop, Antisdel said the university, not the Daily, would respond.

Antisdel added that there’s a possibility that the state Board of Regents may address the issue, but she’s committed to the Daily’s decision to produce its new publication.

“In our mission it doesn’t say that we are a student newspaper. Our mission is that the Daily is a student-owned newspaper for the university community and the faculty and staff are an important part of that community,” she said.