Death of a Newspaper: the Long, Awkward Afterlife of the 'Star-Telegram'

For much of the 20th century and well into this one, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram was the most recognizable brand in town — the unquestioned authority on business, cops, courts, culture, religion, and sports.

If a deal was cut, a crime committed, a coach fired or money found under a pizza, a preacher, ahem, exposed or one firing a pistol in self-defense — or not — or a public fight worth having at City Hall, it showed up in the Star-Telegram. And if it didn’t appear there, that absence mattered because for generations, this was the first place Fort Worth looked to understand itself.

Everything we knew came from the Star-Telegram, Harold Taft, and Paul Harvey. 

As one author noted, the actual Bible and “its surrogate,” the Star-Telegram, were the two journals seen most often in West Texas homes, beginning, of course, in the place “Where the West Begins.” The Star-Telegram’s distribution extended at one time to all of West Texas — from the Colorado River to the Rio Grande River and out to the West Texas town of El Paso. In total, more than 375,000 square miles.

The Star-Telegram didn’t just report the city and region. It was the voice that decided who or what rose — or fell — and what demanded our attention.

That authority was not self-proclaimed. It was earned — and twice affirmed by Pulitzer Prizes. Peers across the country also once recognized a Sports section that was second to none of the nation’s biggest, most venerable and old-line dailies from one coast to the other. 

Advertisers, too, admired and took notice of the audience that at its peak numbered in the hundreds of thousands who each day picked up a paper off the lawn or grabbed one out of a coin-operated news rack. 

Ironically, the Star-Telegram was also a leader in digital news. StarText evolved into one of the first — if not the first — online news platforms. If anyone had the foresight to know where that medium was going, they stayed as quiet as a church mouse. 

As memory serves, everybody thought reading online was cute. Nothing could compare to the St. Johannes Gutenberg’s printed product. Until, of course, something arrived that could compare — and didn’t need to be delivered or paid for. It’s also why no one noticed the revolution wasn’t asking for permission. 

The habits of readers changed faster than smartphone updates. 

Hubris is a royal bitch.  

It all went to shit, of course. To borrow a phrase, the falling out was unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. Certainly, not since Eve’s indiscretions. Or more recently, 1929.  

Readers and advertisers — classifieds and otherwise — went chasing different, younger models, blowing to pieces a business structure that had worked so well, for so long, it was mistaken for permanence. 

“People tend to blame bias [in reporting for the downfall], which could be a part of it, but it’s not the major cause,” says Margaret Sullivan, author of Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy. “They don’t understand that the business model — print advertising — fell off a cliff.”

Nothing lasts forever. Love, marriage, and news anchors — nope. Friendships drift. Bad habits? OK, those linger. 

And newspapers — and their subsequent platforms — were felled by the migration of attention and advertising — not to mention their own hand, Brutus-like — after more than 100 years as the nation’s dominant mass media.

The Star-Telegram went right along with them, but under the added weight of the special circumstances — a perfect storm, really — of its parent company, McClatchy, which for some amounted to the worst proper name in Fort Worth history. And we’ve had some notorious surnames running around here.

As the industry plunged, McClatchy had the added high water of having leveraged almost $5 billion to purchase Knight Ridder and its properties, including the Star-Telegram, in 2006. It wasn’t long before the bottom fell out. Still a profitable paper, every dollar the Star-Telegram made went out the door to try to help pay McClatchy’s debts.

At the heart of the fall were the habits of readers, who found other options.

More recently, for the first time, social media has displaced even television as the way Americans get news, according to a study by the Nieman Journalism Lab. “The proportion accessing news via social media and video networks in the United States (54%) is sharply up,” the report’s authors write, “overtaking both TV news (50%) and news websites/apps (48%) for the first time.”

The popularity of podcasts in the U.S. reflects the amount of investment publishers, producers, and advertisers have put into this auditory medium, further fragmenting the market for news: “Our data suggest that in the U.S. a similar proportion now consume news podcasts each week as read a printed newspaper or magazine (14%) or listen to news and current affairs on the radio (13%).” 

That is all quite problematic as the so-called “rage economy” — a media, political, and digital business model in which anger, outrage, and grievance are intentionally provoked and monetized because they reliably drive attention, engagement, and revenue — has taken root.

That rage — the truthfulness of what those guys “report” is way down the list of their chief priority … engagement and, worse, propagandized disinformation — is directly opposed to the mission of local journalism, which is pivotal to healthy communities and our form of democracy. It is the arm of information closest to the community. In many cases — certainly in the “old” days — readers personally knew writers and editors. That meant something. 

“Local journalism is more trusted, so its loss deepens the problem of mistrust and worsens the belief in partisan falsehoods,” says Sullivan, who was once the editor of her hometown daily, The Buffalo News. Sullivan is also a columnist for the Guardian US. “It also makes people less likely to be engaged in their communities, and even less likely to vote.”

Readers have also lost sight of the value of local journalism, many absolutely refusing to pay for content. “It’s free somewhere,” the thinking goes. 

The mindset drives people like me to the doorstep of the asylum. 

It has also given rise to the nonprofit model of journalism that is trending. The most successful nonprofit going — the last I heard, anyway — is the Texas Tribune. Another has sprouted in recent years — the Fort Worth Report, which does good work. 

The nonprofits stay afloat through philanthropy, basically, though there are other revenue streams.

The expectation of readers actually paying for something, Sullivan says, “has atrophied.”

 “A combination of revenue streams is necessary,” Sullivan says. “Consumer revenue, advertising, and philanthropy — that may be a combination that works.”

OK, so, before we continue, there’s something you should know. Your writer here has a history with the Star-Telegram. I was there when it all went to shit. For readers sensitive to that kind of language, there really is no other way to describe the experience of being up to your neck in dung. Well, in my case, experiences. 

I was also there at what certainly had to have been the newspaper’s height. 

We were blowing and going. We were fat and making money hand over fist. Well, someone was making money hand over fist. 

And management and executives spent it like a drunk believing there would never be a morning after. No expense was ever deemed expendable if it meant giving readers information and vicarious experiences. How else to explain Wayne Lee Gay, the paper’s classical music critic — we had a classical music critic! — traveling the world to profile auditions for the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition?

An intimate look at the competitors, the music that moves them, and the nail-biting decisions that must be made to narrow the list to 30. 

“That would have been four months of our budget,” says one current reporter who wished to remain anonymous. 

Super Bowls — when there was still a reason for the local dailies to be at those — were treated like presidential visits. At least two dozen staffers went out to the Super Bowl — each of the three in four years — to catch everything associated with it. 

Natural disasters called for reporters on-site, whether that be an F5 tornado in Paris (Texas, that is) or Oklahoma, or a hurricane on the Gulf Coast. 

In the mid-1980s, an earthquake devastated Mexico City. The paper sent 10 or so reporters, plus photographers, as well as the executive editor. 

The Star-Telegram was there. 

“For days on end,” says one former staffer. “Money was no object.”

New Reata chef Grady Spears was found in Alpine about to do a three-day photo shoot with Martha Stewart in Marfa.

“‘How fast can you get there,’” remembers a reporter being asked by her editor. “I was on a plane that day with a photographer. It really was a great time to be doing that stuff.”

And there was life in the newsroom. Curious, competitive, opinionated, and flawed — one amalgamated living organism called journalists. Did I mention flawed? 

It was a blast. We had so much fun in that newsroom that extended beyond into social circles and bar life.

Noted author Dan Jenkins, the Fort Worth native and noted author, inscribed in a book he wrote and gave to me: “Newspapers: They sure were fun while they lasted.” Indeedy.

But like Charlie Sheen, that party eventually came crashing down like an imploded Taj Mahal. 

The first sign of trouble was the retirement of Wes Turner, the newspaper’s publisher. New publisher Gary Wortel arrived saying a leaner — and allegedly meaner — operation was forthcoming. Any objective observer would tell you there was indeed fat to cut. 

Other than death itself, change is the only sure thing in this world. 

However, the only strategy employed, by all appearances, was making sure all the legalese in the separation packages aligned. Any strategy about how the news was covered or the paper produced didn’t even seem to enter into the conversation. 

I was in the first batch of those called to the guillotine on the fourth floor — aka human resources.

“I just make the appointments,” said the caller when I asked her why little ol’ me was being brought before the Ministry of Death. 

In the ensuing weeks and months, dozens at a time would be laid off or accepting of buyouts to get out of McClatchy’s hair. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason for who was selected for the needle. It was like a landscaper indiscriminately running down weeds with his chopper. 

During a three-martini lunch on the day of my layoff, it was decided that I’d grieve the loss of my job in golf and distilled spirits. 

It did dawn on some of us, as we took long looks at 10-foot putts, that perhaps the paper, clearly needing to trim, at the same time should at least have tried to sustain a product people wanted to read.

Or not. Desperate measures. But whatever the case, this bunch did not have the innards or the will — or ability — of this newspaper’s maker.

“No is just a word in the dictionary,” Amon Carter once reputedly said. “I don’t often consult a dictionary.”

McClatchy seemingly had no real idea or concern about even trying to market the paper the way Amon Carter once did. 

And McClatchy certainly didn’t know a thing about Fort Worth, Texas, it was clear, as it began sending publishers and newsroom leaders into town. They might as well have been Marvin the Martian.

I eventually went back to the Star-Telegram to write sports as a freelance contractor. My old editor, the sainted Celeste Williams, who vehemently protested the decision to knife me six months earlier, invited me back into the fold, while not completely interrupting my tee times. 

Six months or so later the News Department called. They were offering me a full-time job covering the city of Fort Worth. “The serious stuff,” as Celeste always said. I accepted. 

“You know what this means?” I said to my new editor, the late, great John Gravois.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“I’ll be the first person laid off twice at the Star-Telegram.”

And, so, I was two years or so later.

C’est la vie.

“How Amon Carter and the newspaper are remembered in a thousand years is unimportant,” said one yesteryear newsman, Alf Evans. “Nothing will matter then anyway. But in the old days, everybody had fun. That’s what everybody remembers about Amon Carter. They had fun.”

There was no disputing that the newsroom I worked in had a distinct presence.

Though he had been dead 40 years before I arrived, Amon Carter was still very much there. Those kinds of personalities don’t just fade away. 

A bust of Amon greeted employees and visitors on the foyer entrance on Seventh Street. Awards of journalistic excellence were called “Amons,” with a small statue and all. Think the Oscars. One year, we even had an Oscar-style event to present the winners. 

The Carters even left Amon’s boat, the “West Texan,” behind to Capital Cities for use by employees. I’d always heard rumors that Ruth Carter Stevenson, Amon’s daughter, retrieved the bust at some point from McClatchy. I’d be surprised if she didn’t at least attempt to do the same with the “West Texan” out of fear it’d wind up in a pawn shop. McClatchy was broke. 

The office of the publisher was Amon’s old office. New employees went in there during orientation. The conference room still had all the markings of another time. You could feel something in the newsroom. 

Then again, it could have just been me. 

Jerry Flemmons was a longtime Star-Telegram reporter and writer who wrote the authorized biography of Amon Carter, Amon: The Life of Amon Carter Sr.

Flemmons shares a great anecdote about the founding of the Star-Telegram. 

Amon had just returned to Fort Worth from San Francisco, where he struggled as an advertising salesman. In Fort Worth, he formed the Texas Advertising and Manufacturing Company. 

He had an appointment with another salesman to buy a typewriter. He had no intention of using it but believed the presence of one would impress customers. (He had also been awoken by the salesman while taking a nap to alleviate a hangover, which he acquired at the White Elephant drinking and playing cards, according to Flemmons. Amon was a renowned poker player.)

The salesman eventually got around to another product he was considering: cow chip fuel. The salesman believed there was a market for cow chips soaked in oil for those who couldn’t afford other fuels. There was also plenty of cow chips in Fort Worth. At a demonstration of the alighted cow chips, they were “instantly all aware of inherent weakness” in the potential for cow chips as heat. Burning cow manure stinks. 

So much for that. However, there also were two newspaper reporters on-site to see the demonstration — one from the Dallas Morning News and another from the Fort Worth Record. They struck up a conversation with Amon about forming a daily afternoon newspaper to compete with the Fort Worth Telegram. 

None of them had any money, including Amon Carter, who was all ears. He had business experience, he could sell advertising, and he thought he knew where he could borrow the money to get it up and running. 

Right on the spot, the three also decided on a name, the Star. 

Flemmons made note: “Future social historians, take a footnote: The Fort Worth Star, parent of the Star-Telegram, which would become Texas’ and the South’s largest, most influential publication, was the only newspaper ever conceived and founded over a pile of burning cow manure.”

One of Fort Worth’s early newspapers was the Democrat. Its editor was B.B. Paddock, a former Confederate scout turned civic booster. He was described as portly and Victorian in temperament and tone, according to Flemmons. 

He had tried to place his paper squarely in the path of sin — crusading against Hell’s Half Acre, the city’s notorious red-light district where cowboys, card sharps, and prostitutes relieved cattlemen of their pay. It worked for a bit. 

Cowboys indeed stayed away. So did commerce. Furious merchants demanded Paddock mind his own business. The Acre roared back to life, and Paddock’s paper, like many before it, withered.

The city’s first paper, The Chief, founded in 1849 by the eccentric Anthony Banning Norton, died of obsession. Norton, a Henry Clay man, vowed not to shave or cut his hair until Clay became president. He’d still be waiting. Clay never did. Norton’s beard grew to lengths not seen again until ZZ Top. And readers tired of reading about Henry Clay. 

So long, Chief. Thanks for nothing, Henry Clay. 

By 1906, nearly 40 publications had come and gone in Fort Worth.

Into that woodchipper stepped the Star, whose startup funding was provided by Paul Waples, a wholesale food magnate who gathered together a few friends to finance the venture with $50,000. Waples brought in Louis Wortham as publisher and editor. Amon had no stake in the venture, but he was offered the job of ad salesman. 

At its conception, only two papers remained standing. C.D. Reimers’ Telegram, a successful afternoon daily run by a shrewd businessman and mediocre journalist, and Clarence Ousley’s Record, a morning paper. Ousley, however, did something that mattered. He fought the Associated Press monopoly that allowed the Dallas News exclusive access to national wire copy in North Texas. He won. The Record and the Telegram became AP papers.

The Star did not.

Frozen out of the AP, the fledgling paper was left with a skeletal Scripps-McRae wire service — 500 words a day. Enough to survive? Hardly. 

By late 1908, the situation was brutally simple.

The Fort Worth Star was failing.

The Fort Worth Telegram was thriving.

The Star had vision, energy, and salesmanship — largely because of Amon — but it lacked capital and consistent advertising support. The Telegram had strong circulation, Associated Press access, and a healthy advertising base. It was the dominant afternoon paper in Fort Worth.

Carter and Wortham — who had squeezed out the two journalists, A.G. Dawson and M.C. McCaleb — eventually reached the same conclusion: The only way the Star could survive was to buy the Telegram.

“We were failing, so we decided to expand,” Carter said, according to Flemmons.

The idea was absurd. The weaker paper buying the stronger one ran against every business instinct in town.

A front man, O.P. Thomas of the Abilene Chamber of Commerce, set up a deal to purchase the Telegram for $100,000. Amon pawned nearly everything he owned. If the rest couldn’t be raised, Amon, who had a wife and child, planned to accept a job in New York. 

Carter and Wortham returned to Waples, the original Star backer, who initially showed little interest. Carter talked — relentlessly — until Waples agreed to back the deal.

Other Fort Worth businessmen followed, including W.C. Stripling and other merchants who had once refused to advertise in the Star. The paper that had been dismissed as doomed was now buying its rival.

Waples structured the ownership so that Carter and Wortham each received 10% of the new company — even though Carter had no cash to pay for his share. He secured it with borrowed collateral, including a piece of swamp land in Florida.

By November 1908, the Telegram was sold.

On Dec. 31, 1908, Carter walked into the Star newsroom and handed managing editor Jimmy North a short announcement to box on page one. It declared that the Star was ceasing publication.

Reporters were stunned.

Carter coolly told them that a “new paper” might be starting up the next day at Eighth and Throckmorton streets — the address of the Telegram building — and that if they showed up early, they might get jobs.

Minutes later, word spread that the Telegram was also shutting down.

Both staffs went drinking, according to Flemmons.

The Star-Telegram — and a monopoly — was born on the biggest gamble Amon Carter ever made to that point. 

The new paper stabilized its finances, consolidated advertising, and eventually became one of the most profitable newspapers in the country. Amon Carter in the 1920s even had the audacity to turn down an offer from publishing giant William Randolph Hearst, who then purchased the Fort Worth Record. 

The Star-Telegram very shortly after ran the Record and Hearst out of town. 

Rather than strength, it all emerged from the Star’s nadir. 

The Star-Telegram, 117 years later, is back at its nadir. Few are having any fun. 

Rather than an Amon Carter and Paul Waples, the paper is owned by Chatham Asset Management, a hedge fund which bought the chain out of bankruptcy in 2020. The deal was valued at $312 million for more than two dozen news outlets in 14 states, including the Sacramento Bee, the Miami Herald, and the Star-Telegram. 

In addition to the Carter family’s ownership — Amon died in 1955 — the Star-Telegram has now been held under five other owners, beginning with the family’s sale to Capital Cities in 1974, which included WBAP radio. (KXAS/Ch. 5 was sold to Lin Broadcasting for $35 million.) In 1996, Cap Cities/ABC merged with Disney, which off-loaded its newspaper properties to Knight-Ridder. 

McClatchy bought out Knight Ridder in 2006. The floor fell out about a year later. 

It has been well-documented — or perhaps the phraseology is “well-known” — that Ruth Carter Stevenson strongly resisted the original sale of Carter Communications in 1974 for $80 million. Who knows how history would have been changed had she won that family argument.

What’s next for the Star-Telegram? God only knows. 

It is, of course, a shell of its former self. Once a newsroom buzzing with hundreds of journalists, today there isn’t even a newsroom. The paper works out of a coworking space on the West Side. When the paper began layoffs in 2008, it employed more than 1,000, including those at the printing plant, a building originally constructed for $73 million in the 1980s. The paper later sold the building after it ceased printing its own paper. 

It prints a paper Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday. 

“Of the hedge funds that could have bought us, this was probably the best one,” says a current staff member. 

Chatham has kept the McClatchy name in its portfolio, though the company is now private. Alden Global Capital, another bidder, was in on the recent sale of the Dallas Morning News, which was eventually purchased by Hearst.

Hedge fund ownership is part of a trend in traditional news platform ownership. And they don’t have the best reputation for it. Many have come in and gutted news organizations, harvesting internal organs with no concern for puncturing the stomach and intestines, before taking to the processor. 

Chatham has resisted doing that. 

Local journalism is pivotal to healthy communities. It is the arm of information closest to the community. In many cases — certainly in the “old” days — readers personally knew writers and editors. That meant something. 

One staffer credited Steve Coffman, the newspaper’s president, for advocating for the staff and its mission as custodians of an industry built on the watchdog work of holding government and commerce to account. 

“The one thing to his credit Steve has done is made keeping jobs a priority,” says one staffer. “We really haven’t had any substantial layoffs in a long, long time. We did lose a couple people a few months ago who were audience growth. But I mean, the reality of it is we’re a small news organization now of a staff of, I don’t even know, what we are, 30 to 40 people?”

It’s difficult to imagine a “daily” in a city of one million getting smaller, but it could always get smaller. 

The Star-Telegram lost employees in the aftermath of a labor strike in 2022. Members of the Fort Worth NewsGuild — we didn’t have a union when I was there — walked off the job for 24 days. They sought better pay, severance pay, and sick leave policies. 

Their new contract was something of a consolation prize. The union said at the time that management moved ever so slightly on pay. 

“I think we all had to come to the unfortunate realization that the company was never going to give us something that was fair,” said Kaley Johnson, a union leader, at the time of the strike. “They had no intention of doing that. We just fought as hard as we could for something close to fair.

“They had no priority to [meet us] on those things. Their priority was to save as much money as possible, and they don’t really care what else.”

One former staffer who was part of the strike said, despite a conciliatory tone, Coffman held a grudge over the walkout. She estimated that roughly three employees who were part of the strike remain on staff. 

“It just became a little toxic because Steve was still so mad and petty and passive aggressive about everything that went on with the strike,” the staffer said. “He always kind of saw [the strike] as a personal attack.”

That animosity toward striking employees, she said, also stalled careers inside the organization because of roadblocks put up by Coffman.

Coffman did not respond to an interview request.

“That would really surprise me,” said another current staffer.

News publishers have new concerns: artificial intelligence.

A survey by Nieman Lab showed that confidence has sunk to one of its lowest points in years, with fewer than four in 10 executives expressing optimism about journalism as a whole. At the same time, a slim majority say they remain confident in their own organizations — a disconnect that reflects an industry bracing for disruption while hoping to outmaneuver it.

A major source of anxiety is the accelerating influence of AI, which is reshaping how audiences find and consume information. Executives describe a coming shift away from static articles toward more fluid, personalized “liquid content” that can be reassembled by AI systems depending on a user’s needs. 

As AI-powered “answer engines” increasingly bypass traditional search and deliver information directly, publishers fear losing both visibility and control over how their journalism reaches the public. That erosion is already showing up in traffic patterns. Referral traffic from search engines, long a cornerstone of digital publishing, continues to decline, forcing news organizations to rethink both distribution and revenue.

While subscriptions, advertising, and events remain critical, many publishers are also eyeing partnerships with AI companies and technology platforms as potential new income streams — even as those same platforms contribute to the industry’s instability.

Publishers also feel pressure from another direction: the booming creator economy. Independent creators, influencers, and newsletter writers are capturing attention, talent, and advertising dollars, particularly among younger audiences. 

In response, newsrooms are experimenting with creator-style strategies of their own, encouraging journalists to build personal brands, expanding video and social platforms like YouTube, and forming partnerships that blur the line between traditional journalism and creator-led media.

As it turns out, Amon Carter — with his larger-than-life persona he deployed to become the ultimate influencer — was way ahead of his time 100 years ago. He, along with his friends, such as Will Rogers, was the best storyteller going for a couple of generations.

And he didn’t need social media or AI to do it. 

In the end, the local news platforms — which supposedly employ the best storytellers in town — have done a lousy job of telling their story. 

Irony and Greek tragedy are inseparable.

“We have not done a great job of telling our own story because for a long time we didn’t have to,” Sullivan says. “We need to do a lot better with that, especially in the age of social media, partisan influencers, and widespread misinformation.”