Publication date:
11 September 2019Length of book:
326 pagesPublisher
Rowman & Littlefield PublishersDimensions:
237x160mm6x9"
ISBN-13: 9780742548725
The Evening Star: The Rise and Fall of a Great Washington Newspaper is the story of the 129-year history of one of the preeminent newspapers in journalism history when city newspapers across the country were at the height of their power and influence. The Star was the most financially successful newspaper in the Capital and among the top ten in the country until its decline in the 1970s. The paper began in 1852 when the capital city was a backwater southern town. The Star’s success over the next century was due to its singular devotion to local news, its many respected journalists, and the historic times in which it was published. The book provides a unique perspective on more than a century of local, national and international history.
The book also exposes the complex reasons for the Star’s rise and fall from dominance in Washington’s newspaper market. The Noyes and Kauffmann families who owned and operated the Star for a century play an important role in that story. Patriarch Crosby Noyes’ life and legacy is the most fascinating –a classic Horatio Alger story of the illegitimate son of a Maine farmer who by the time of his death was a respected newspaper publisher and member of Washington’s influential elite. In 1974 his descendants sold the once-great newspaper Noyes built to Joseph Allbritton. Allbritton and then Time, Inc. tried to save the Star but failed.
The book also exposes the complex reasons for the Star’s rise and fall from dominance in Washington’s newspaper market. The Noyes and Kauffmann families who owned and operated the Star for a century play an important role in that story. Patriarch Crosby Noyes’ life and legacy is the most fascinating –a classic Horatio Alger story of the illegitimate son of a Maine farmer who by the time of his death was a respected newspaper publisher and member of Washington’s influential elite. In 1974 his descendants sold the once-great newspaper Noyes built to Joseph Allbritton. Allbritton and then Time, Inc. tried to save the Star but failed.
The old line about newspapers and the bottom of a birdcage is especially pertinent when it comes to newspapers no longer in business. Even the great dailies of yesteryear—the Philadelphia Public Ledger, New York Herald Tribune, Boston Evening Transcript—tend to live on largely in the memories of old hands, in historical cartoons, or in the biographies of novelists who began as reporters. A case in point is Washington’s old Evening Star, always “old” in the recollection of ex-staffers and aging residents of the nation’s capital, with the original name preferred to its brief, final incarnation: the Washington Star. If the Evening Star is remembered at all nowadays, it is recalled as an incubator of political journalists of the last century—David Broder, Mary McGrory, Haynes Johnson and others—and as the newspaper that was put out of business by the Washington Post, where Broder, McGrory and Johnson found new homes and wider fame. The whole story is faithfully chronicled by Faye Haskins, a former library archivist, in The Evening Star: The Rise and Fall of a Great Washington Newspaper.