Star-News

• 1. Introduction

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  StarNews, the daily newspaper serving Wilmington, North Carolina, holds a distinction that few American papers can claim: it is the oldest newspaper in North Carolina to have been published continuously without interruption. That includes surviving a hurricane that ripped through the region in September 2018, forcing staff to file stories from a Hampton Inn, a local television station, and the homes of their own colleagues. The paper never missed an edition.

  How does a newspaper born in the aftermath of the Civil War survive into the age of digital media, corporate consolidation, and natural disaster? And what does its history reveal about the city it has served for more than a century and a half? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. A Confederate Major's Paper

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  On the 23rd of September 1867, a former Confederate Major named William H. Bernard put out the first edition of what he called the Wilmington Evening Star. The war had been over for only two years. Wilmington was still finding its footing in a changed South.

  Bernard did not keep the paper in its original evening format for long. He quickly shifted publication to the morning hours and renamed it the Wilmington Morning Star. The change in schedule was practical, but the paper's politics were unmistakable from the start. A direct quote from the paper's own record describes its stance as "ardent advocacy of white supremacy." That position, the source notes, was never more starkly visible than in the Morning Star's coverage of the Wilmington race riots of 1898, one of the most violent episodes of racial terror in American history.

• 3. The Page Family Era

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  In 1927, a man named R. W. Page bought the Morning Star, and within two years he had also acquired the city's afternoon rival, the Wilmington News-Dispatch. That paper was eventually shortened to simply the Wilmington News. Late in 1929, Page made a move that would shape the paper's identity for decades: he launched a combined Sunday edition drawing from both papers, calling it the Star-News.

  The Page family held ownership of both papers through the decades that followed, from the Depression years through the postwar boom and into the early years of the television age. Their tenure ended in 1975, when The New York Times Company purchased the operation. For the better part of five decades, Wilmington's newspaper had been a family enterprise rooted in the city it covered.

• 4. A Building, Then a Merger

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  From 1935 to 1970, the Morning Star operated out of the Murchison Building on North Front Street in downtown Wilmington. In 1970 the paper relocated to 1003 17th Street South, the address it would occupy for decades.

  The separation between the morning and afternoon papers finally ended on the 24th of April 2003. On that date, the Morning Star and the Wilmington News stopped running as distinct products and merged into a single seven-day publication. The combined paper took the name StarNews, inheriting the identity of the Sunday edition Page had created back in 1929.

• 5. Hurricane Florence and After

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  Hurricane Florence made landfall in September 2018 and caused enough damage to the StarNews building that the staff could not operate from it. The paper moved through a sequence of makeshift locations: a Hampton Inn, the facilities of local station WWAY, and the personal homes of staff members. Eventually the team settled into a temporary space in the Harrelson Building.

  Through every displacement, the paper kept publishing. That continuity is what sustains the claim to being North Carolina's oldest newspaper in continuous publication.

  After the storm years came a series of structural changes. In March 2022, the StarNews dropped its Saturday print edition, shifting to a six-day printing schedule. By December 2023, the paper had also announced it was moving from carrier delivery to mail delivery through the U.S. Postal Service, a shift that reflected the economic pressures reshaping community newspapers across the country.

• 6. Corporate Hands

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  The New York Times Company held the paper from 1975 until the 6th of January 2012, when it sold to Halifax Media Group. Halifax in turn was acquired by New Media Investment Group in 2015, which meant the StarNews passed under the GateHouse Media umbrella during that same period.

  In 2019, New Media merged with Gannett, and the merged company kept the Gannett name. The StarNews today sits inside one of the largest newspaper chains in the United States, covering a three-county region in Southeastern North Carolina: New Hanover, Brunswick, and Pender. A paper that once belonged to a single Confederate veteran has changed hands through some of the most significant ownership consolidations in American media history.