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. It goes without saying that 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 is thanks to Amon G. Carter, an advertising space salesman from Fort Worth that the Fort Worth newspaper was founded and published continuously from February 1, 1906.
The initial name was the Fort Worth Star, and it did not have the popular acclaim Carter had expected. Given the fact that the newspaper was losing money severely, Carter took the decision of buying the rival publication the Fort Worth Telegram, and this is how 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 covered one of the largest distribution areas in the South of the United States.
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 own the newspaper for other thirty years, but in 1974, they concluded the purchase transaction with Capital Cities Communications, the group that also bought the ABC TV network. The Fort Worth Star Telegram changed owners again as the Capital Cities/ABC group was purchased by The Walt Disney Company.
The McClatchy Corporation only took over the Star-Telegram in 2006. The circulation area of the publication is surely reduced as compared to its early history, but the context is justified given the huge number of newspapers, magazines and tabloids that serve the American market daily. The Star-Telegram also has an online variant, and it is the oldest American publication with Internet operation. Presently, the Fort Worth Star Telegram undergoes various transformations meant to keep up with the evolution of the market both in the electronic and the paper format so that it may be perceived as both reader friendly and quality promoter.
