FORT WORTH STAR-TELEGRAM

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

History

Market

Pulitzer Prizes

Trivia

References

External link

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 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.[2]

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, 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

★ 2007 Top 100 Daily Newspapers in the U.S. by Circulation

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

★ McClatchy Newspapers: ''Fort Worth Star-Telegram'' McClatchy Company, The

External link

★ The ''Star-Telegram's official site