NY- In New York’s tabloid newspaper war, revenge is a dish best served boldface.

Over the last few years, The Daily News has taken its lumps from its crosstown tabloid rival, The New York Post. No perceived gaffe has escaped The Post’s coverage, whether it concerned the regularity with which The Daily News’ owner, Mortimer B. Zuckerman, shuffled top editors, or a “Scratch n’ Match” contest last year that, because of a typographical error, led thousands of Daily News readers to think they each had won $100,000. Writers at The Post regularly point out gossip items that they reported ahead of the “Daily Snooze” – as they call their larger, slightly more sober and more liberal rival.

All the while, The Daily News’ once daunting lead in circulation over The Post has been gradually narrowing on weekdays, in part because The Post cut its cover price by half in 2000. Last December, The Post even hired away The Daily News’ president and chief operating officer.

Now The Daily News has pulled out all the stops in its coverage of accusations of attempted bribery involving a popular contributor to The Post’s vaunted Page Six gossip column. That followed a report in The Daily News on March 31 that accused The Post of dumping at least 10,000 copies of the paper at recycling facilities in Brooklyn, where it claimed the bundles of papers were destined for China.

Col Allan, The Post’s editor in chief, said of The Daily News’ aggressive coverage of his paper: “The Daily News has lost tens of thousands in circulation to The Post in recent years, and The Post is poised to overtake The Daily News’ circulation. Of course it’s driving their agenda.”

As for how The Post covered its in-house scandal – well, in classic self-congratulatory Post style, it ran a brief story on Page 3 last Friday that included the boast, ‘The Post broke the story on its Web site yesterday.”

In addition to breaking its own story, The Post has suspended the gossip writer, Jared Paul Stern, who is accused by the billionaire Ronald W. Burkle of attempted extortion. The Post is cooperating with the criminal investigation into videotaped meetings Mr. Stern had with Mr. Burkle. The Post declined to comment on The Daily News’ dumping claims.

Martin Dunn, The Daily News’ editor in chief, denied that the paper was trying to exploit the Burkle story to hit back at its rival. He said the scandal – which The News first called “Page Sick,” then later amended to “Page Fix” – would have merited coverage regardless of whether it concerned a chief rival. The dumping story, he added, was legitimate newspaper industry news.

“In fairness, we try to stay above all that,” Mr. Dunn said in a telephone interview. “If any billionaire was shaken down by anyone, that would be a story.”

But it is The Post. And, as Michael Cooke, the previous editor in chief of The Daily News pointed out: “There’s a wonderful added bonus of delight that it happened to the evil New York Post.”

Beginning with a front-page splash on Friday, The Daily News has hammered on the story about Mr. Stern’s supposed attempt to extract $220,000 in payments from Mr. Burkle in exchange for kinder treatment in Page Six, where Mr. Burkle has said he had been the subject of inaccurate and damaging coverage. The Daily News ran the story on its front page for three days running and was the first news outlet to have access to video and transcripts of the supposed shakedown attempt.

William Sherman, the Daily News reporter who wrote the stories on Mr. Stern and Mr. Burkle, said in an interview yesterday that he had first heard about the extortion attempt two days before the videotaped meeting between the journalist and the billionaire on March 31, their second meeting. Mr. Sherman, who won a Pulitzer Prize in local investigative reporting for The Daily News in 1974, said that the story had come to him directly from more than one source, not from one of his editors.

Mr. Sherman described the mood in the Daily News newsroom on Friday as like any other. Another journalist at the paper said Mr. Dunn was “joyous.”

Both Mr. Sherman and people at The New York Post said there was astonishment in their newsrooms over the severity of the ethical and potentially legal breaches that Mr. Stern was alleged to have committed. Over the weekend, Mr. Stern said, “I can’t defend my lack of judgment here.”

But his actions shined a spotlight on a beat where the two papers compete most fiercely – gossip – and where Page Six has been the gold standard. And it has given The Daily News a rare opportunity to win back some of the unquantifiable but crucial element of tabloid combat that it had been ceding to The Post: buzz.

On Friday, The Daily News dispatched photographers to the Midtown office tower of The Post and its corporate owner, the News Corporation, to take photos of the company’s chairman, Rupert Murdoch, getting in and out of his limousine after the story broke.

It is Mr. Murdoch, after all, who has made it a personal priority over the last three decades to try to snatch the circulation crown from The Daily News, despite the fact that The Post represents a very small cog in his $54 billion media empire. The Post is also the only newspaper he still owns in North America.

Mr. Murdoch purchased the paper in 1976 but sold it in 1988 to comply with regulations that barred him from owning TV stations and newspapers in the same market. He later secured a waiver that allowed him, in 1993, to repurchase the paper and save it from shutting down.

The same year, Mr. Zuckerman, a wealthy real estate developer and publisher, bought The News out of bankruptcy protection.

In the mid-1990’s, Mr. Murdoch introduced a Sunday edition of The Post, a move he followed by lowering the weekday cover price to 25 cents, half the price of The Daily News.

The gap between the two papers in weekday circulation has narrowed mightily since early 2000, when The Daily News, which has a liberal outlook, averaged sales of 730,542 and The Post, which is staunchly conservative, sold 436,544. In the latest figures available from the Audit Bureau of Circulations, The Post had average weekday sales of 672,731 in the six months that ended last Sept. 30, within striking distance of the 688,584 for The Daily News. On Sundays, The Daily News held a much larger lead over The Post, with sales of 781,375 versus 425,279.

Mr. Zuckerman’s camp has argued that The Daily News has managed to stay profitable while competing against a money-losing, subsidized rival that exists to further the interests of its owner, Mr. Murdoch.

While The Post has reportedly had annual losses in recent years of some $40 million, Post executives have argued that the newspaper’s punchy and more sensational style and lower cover price will soon allow it to overtake The Daily News in weekday sales, a development that could enable The Post to lure big advertisers away from The Daily News.

In its own pages, The Post describes itself as “the fastest-growing newspaper in America,” while it calls The Daily News “circulation-challenged.”

Both papers are confronting the challenges of the Internet and the introduction in New York of two free daily commuter newspapers.

And over the last several years, The Post and The News have carried stories raising questions about the validity of one another’s sales figures, amid circulation scandals at papers elsewhere. An article in The News on March 31 had the added element of an official from the Audit Bureau of Circulations joining its reporters on the scene to witness the dumping. Heidi Chen, a spokeswoman for the auditing group, said that The Daily News report was accurate, but declined to elaborate.

Mr. Cooke, the former Daily News editor, said in an interview that the tabloid battle was a preoccupation of the paper “every minute of every day, from the highest levels of the newsroom to the interns. And that’s not because they’re scared of them. It’s because it’s a war, and in a war it’s 24-7.” He edited the paper for roughly a year before resigning in January to become a vice president at the Sun-Times News Group.

When either paper fumbles, it does not escape the counterpart’s notice. For instance, the Daily News newsroom was festooned with front pages of The Post when the newspaper wrongly reported the “exclusive” news that John F. Kerry had selected Richard Gephardt as his running mate in the last presidential election.

It is indicative of the changes in the media landscape over the last few decades that America’s bloodiest tabloid newspaper wars is also a rarity. “There are very few places where this occurs any longer, because there are very few places that have competitive newspapers,” said John Morton, a newspaper industry analyst.

Pete Hamill, a veteran tabloid columnist and novelist who briefly edited both The Daily News and The Post over his career, said in an interview that the animus between the two papers was a relatively recent phenomenon. He posited that it was a function of the importing of British-style tabloid editors to oversee both papers over the years. (Mr. Dunn and Mr. Cooke are from England, and Mr. Allan is a veteran of Mr. Murdoch’s Australian tabloids.).

“The way to beat the other guy is to have the best stories, have them written at the top of everyone’s talent, and stay true to the tabloid tradition – to find the drama in the story,” Mr. Hamill said. “You don’t pick up a tabloid to find out about the sisal crop in Malaysia. The best story of any type in a tabloid is murder at a good address. You don’t become a better paper than the other guy by making remarks.”