Fort Worth Star-Telegram

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Type Daily newspaper
Format Broadsheet

Owner The McClatchy Company
Publisher Gary Wortel
Editor Jim Witt
Founded 1906 (as Fort Worth Star)
Headquarters 400 West Seventh Street
Fort Worth, Texas 76102
Flag of the United States United States
Circulation 210,990 Daily
304,200 Sunday[1]
ISSN 0889-0013

Website: Star-Telegram.com

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram is a major U.S. daily newspaper serving Fort Worth and the western half of the North Texas area known as the Metroplex. Its area of domination is checked by its main rival, The Dallas Morning News, which is published from the eastern half of the Metroplex. It is owned by The McClatchy Company.

Contents

[edit] History

In May 1905, Amon G. Carter accepted a job as an advertising space salesman in Fort Worth. A few months later, he agreed to help finance and run a new newspaper in town. The Fort Worth Star printed its first newspaper on February 1, 1906, with Carter as the advertising manager.

The Star lost money, and was in danger of going bankrupt when Carter had an audacious idea: raise additional money and purchase his newspaper's main competition, the Fort Worth Telegram. In November 1908, the Star purchased the Telegram for $100,000, and the two newspapers combined on January 1, 1909 into the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

From 1923 until after World War II, the Star-Telegram was distributed over one of the largest circulation areas of any newspaper in the South, serving not just Fort Worth but also West Texas, New Mexico and western Oklahoma. The newspaper created WBAP in 1922 and Texas' first television station, WBAP-TV, in 1948.

After owning the Star-Telegram for more than six decades, the Carter family sold it in 1974 to Capital Cities Communications, which later purchased the ABC television network. The Walt Disney Company acquired Capital Cities/ABC in 1996; it sold the Star-Telegram and its other newspaper holdings to the Knight Ridder newspaper chain in 1997. McClatchy became the Star-Telegram’s fifth owner when it purchased Knight Ridder in June 2006.

[edit] Market

The Star-Telegram’s circulation area is the Fort Worth/Arlington metro area (four counties) and 14 surrounding counties. The newspaper's primary market is the four-county Fort Worth/Arlington metro area (as well as the Dallas suburb of Grand Prairie), which is the western part of the fourth-largest U.S. metropolitan area, the Dallas/Fort Worth/Arlington Combined Statistical Area. Fort Worth/Arlington ranks 29th most populous as a metro area.[1]

[edit] Pulitzer prizes

[edit] Online presence

The Star-Telegram is the nation's oldest continuously operating online newspaper.[citation needed] StarText, an ASCII-based service, was started in 1982 and eventually integrated into the paper's current website. In 2008, the Star-Telegram launched an infotainment web series called the DaFoWo Show. The title is derived from Dallas-Fort Worth.

[edit] References

  • Jerry Flemmons. Amon: The Texan Who Played Cowboy for America. Lubbock, TX : Texas Tech, 1998.

[edit] External links