Fort Worth Star Telegram Photograph Collection

      The Fort Worth Star was founded in 1906 by a group of newsmen, including Col. Louis J. Worthham as publisher, Amon G. Carter, Sr. as advertising manager, D. C. Mc Caleb,  and A. G. Dawson. The men also had the help of wholesale grocer and a major investor, Col. Paul Waples. The new paper, known as  the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, began publication in 1909, and was later identified in the 1920s by a phrase on its masthead, “Where the West Begins.”

     In 1922, the paper began the first Fort Worth radio station, WBAP. It was the first television station in the Southern half of the United States in the early Fall of 1948. In 1954, WBAP-TV broadcast the first colorcast television program in Texas at a time when there were no more than 100 television sets in Fort Worth and Dallas. The paper was sold to Capital Cities Communications Inc., in 1974.

     In the 1980s, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram pioneered the establishment of electronic information services and built one of the most modern printing and distribution plants in the nation. The StarText, an “electronic news paper" begun in 1982, was made available on computer via a local telephone call in the Fort Worth and Dallas area.

      The Star-Telegram won two Pulitzer Prizes by 1985. The first was in 1981 for photographer Larry Price’s photos of Liberian officials being slain by a firing squad. The second, in 1985, was the coveted gold medal Pulitzer for meritorious public service. It was awarded for a news series that exposed a flaw in Bell helicopters that was a factor in numerous crashes over a seventeen year period. In early 1990s, the circulation climbed above 290,000 daily and more than 350,000 on Sundays.

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