Fort Worth Star-Telegram
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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.
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, the first radio station in Fort Worth, in 1922; and followed it with 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.
Market
The Star-Telegram’s circulation area is the Fort Worth/Arlington metro area (four counties) and 14 surrounding counties. The readership is 501,400 daily and 676,200 on Sunday with circulation at 237,318 daily and 332,861 on Sunday. The newspaper's primary market is the four-county Fort Worth/Arlington metro area, which is the western part of the fifth-largest U.S. metro area, (Combined Statistical Area) Dallas/Fort Worth/Arlington. Fort Worth/Arlington ranks 29th most populous as a metro area.Pulitzer Prizes
- 1981 Pulitzer Prize in Spot News Photography - Larry Price of the Star-Telegram "for his photographs from Liberia."
- 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service - Mark J. Thompson "For reporting which revealed that nearly 250 U.S. servicemen had lost their lives as a result of a design problem in helicopters built by Bell Helicopter - a revelation which ultimately led the Army to ground almost 600 Huey helicopters pending their modification."
Trivia
- Part of an episode of the CBS show Walker, Texas Ranger was filmed at the Star-Telegram.
- Two Star-Telegram writers, the late Jerry Flemmons and Michael Cochran (former AP writer), served as pallbearers for Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963.
- The Star-Telegram is the nation's oldest continuously operating online newspaper. StarText, an ASCII-based service, was started in 1982 and eventually morphed into the current Web site, [Star-Telegram.com].
References
- Flemmons, Jerry. Amon: The Texan Who Played Cowboy for America. Lubbock, TX : Texas Tech, 1998.
External link
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