Fort Worth Star Telegram
November 26, 2009
The main daily newspaper of the western part of Texas, Fort Worth Star Telegram is issued in Fort Worth and shares its distribution area with the Dallas Morning News. As we’d expect a very tight competition exists between the two newspapers that claim prominence over their part of the United States. Presently, the Fort Worth Star Telegram is the property of The McClatchy Company, but its beginnings are found sometime in the early years of the 20th century when the first edition of the newspaper was issued for the first time. It all started with Amon G. Carter being hired as an advertising space salesman in Fort Worth, and in a few months he got to finance and run the town’s newspaper that finally came in print on February 1, 1906.
The initial name was the Fort Worth Star, and it did not enjoy the popular acclaim Carter had expected. Given a serious financial loss, Carter took the decision of buying its competitor the Fort Worth Telegram, and thus the Fort Worth Star Telegram came into being at the beginning of 1909. Between 1923 and the aftermath of the Second World War, The Fort Worth Star Telegram was distributed and widely read in all the South of the US.
West Texas, New Mexico and the western part of Oklahoma were reading the Fort Worth Star Telegram during the period. The first television ever created in Texas, the WBAP-TV was founded in 1948 at the initiative of the newspaper’s owners. The Carter family continued to run the newspaper for other thirty years, but in 1974, they sold it to Capital Cities Communications, the group that also bought the ABC TV network. When the Walt Disney Company bought Capital Cities/ABC group, the Fort Worth Star Telegram changed owners once more.
The McClatchy Corporation only took over the Star-Telegram in 2006. The circulation area of the publication is surely reduced if compared to its early days, but the situation is explainable given the large number of newspapers, magazines and tabloids that serve the American market daily. The newspaper can also be accessed online, and it is the oldest American publication with Internet operation. Presently, the Fort Worth Star Telegram undergoes all sorts of market adaptations both in the electronic and the paper format so that it may be perceived as both reader friendly and quality promoter.
