Toronto Star

• 1. Introduction

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  The Toronto Star was born out of a labour dispute. In 1892, a group of striking printers and writers from the Toronto News walked off the job and started their own paper. Among them was Horatio Clarence Hocken, a social reformer who would later become mayor of Toronto. Another future mayor, Jimmy Simpson, also helped found it. The paper they created would grow into Canada's largest-circulation daily, outlasting rivals, surviving economic crises, and carrying a set of founding principles that shaped national social policy.

  But survival was never guaranteed. In its earliest years, the Star was so shaky that Hocken himself sold out within the year. It changed hands several times before finding the man who would define it for the next half century. How did a struggling labour paper become the editorial conscience of a country? And what happens to a newspaper when the owner who shaped it dies, but refuses to let go of its soul?

• 2. A Shaky Start

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  83 Yonge Street was the Star's first address, shared with the Toronto World newspaper. The arrangement was unusual: The World held a 51 percent interest in the new paper as a silent partner. That partnership lasted only two months before rumours circulated that William Findlay Maclean, The World's proprietor, was considering selling to the Riordon family. The Star staff launched a fundraising campaign to buy him out, and Maclean eventually agreed to sell his stake to Hocken.

  Hocken himself departed within the year, and a succession of owners followed. The paper did poorly. It wasn't until 1896 that railway entrepreneur William Mackenzie bought it, and editors Edmund E. Sheppard and Frederic Thomas Nicholls moved the entire operation into the building used by the magazine Saturday Night. That was the state of the Star when a more consequential buyer arrived three years later.

• 3. The Atkinson Era

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  On the 13th of December 1899, Joseph E. Atkinson took control of the Toronto Star. He was backed by funds raised by supporters of Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier, including Senator George Cox, William Mulock, Peter Charles Larkin, and Timothy Eaton. Atkinson, known informally as "Holy Joe," would remain the paper's editor until his death in 1948.

  Atkinson championed causes that would later define Canada's welfare state: old age pensions, unemployment insurance, and publicly funded health care. His paper's early opposition to the Nazi regime made the Star one of the first North American newspapers to be banned in Germany. The Government of Canada Digital Collections website described him as a "radical" in the best sense of the word, calling the Star unique among North American newspapers in its consistent advocacy for ordinary people.

  His son-in-law, Harry C. Hindmarsh, served as longtime managing editor and increased circulation through sensational stories, bold headlines, and dramatic photographs. The paper also carried heavy doses of crime reporting, reflecting the yellow journalism of the era, even as it simultaneously advocated for social reform. That tension between tabloid instincts and civic idealism ran through the Atkinson decades.

  Atkinson's friendship with Prime Minister Mackenzie King became a genuine force in Canadian public life. Scholars have credited their relationship with shaping Canadian social policy in ways that outlasted both men.

• 4. The Fight Over the Will

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  Shortly before his death in 1948, Atkinson transferred ownership of the paper to a charitable organization. His intention was to ensure the Star would permanently serve what he called the promotion of social, scientific, and economic reforms, for the benefit of the people of Ontario. The will stipulated the paper could be sold only to those who shared his values.

  Ontario's response came in 1949, when the province passed the Charitable Gifts Act, which barred charitable organizations from owning large portions of profit-making businesses. That law effectively forced a sale. The solution was unusual: five trustees of the charitable organization bought the paper themselves and swore before the Supreme Court of Ontario to continue the principles Atkinson had embedded in the paper's identity.

  Those principles, which became formally known as the Atkinson Principles, included a strong, united, and independent Canada; social justice; individual and civil liberties; community and civic engagement; the rights of working people; and the necessary role of government. When Atkinson's son Joseph Story Atkinson became president of the Star in 1957, he said the paper had, from its inception in 1892, been a champion of social and economic reform, a defender of minority rights, a foe of discrimination, a friend of organized labour, and an advocate of Canadian nationhood.

• 5. Beyond the Printed Page

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  Under Atkinson, the Star reached beyond the printed page in ways its founding printers could not have imagined. In 1910, it launched the Star Weekly, a weekend supplemental magazine that ran until 1973. In 1922, the paper became a radio broadcaster on its own station, CFCA, transmitting on a wavelength of 400 metres. Its programming complemented the newspaper's reporting.

  CFCA was shut down after the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission was established and government policy restricted private stations to 100 watts of effective radiated power. But the Star's broadcast presence didn't disappear entirely. The paper supplied sponsored content to the CRBC's CRCT station, which later became CBC station CBL. That arrangement continued until 1946.

  The Star's website launched in 1996, and in 2015 it released the Star Touch tablet app for iPad, a free interactive news product modelled on a similar app developed for Montreal-based La Presse in 2013. Within slightly over 50 days of its launch, Star Touch had reached 100,000 downloads. An Android version followed on the 1st of December 2015.

• 6. Buildings and Addresses

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  Two Toronto Star headquarters buildings shaped the downtown Toronto skyline in their time. The Old Toronto Star Building at 80 King Street West was completed in 1929. Its successor, the Toronto Star Building at 1 Yonge Street by Queens Quay, opened in 1971 in the International style and became a prominent glass tower near the waterfront.

  The move from 80 King Street West was not gentle. The original 1929 building was demolished to make room for First Canadian Place. The 1971 building at 1 Yonge Street served as headquarters for decades, but the Star sold it in 2000. The paper then rented space back in the same building until 2022, when the COVID-19 pandemic's shift to remote work made large office spaces unnecessary. In November 2022, the Star moved to 8 Spadina Avenue, into The Well on Spadina Avenue at Front Street, leasing rather than owning its home for the first time in nearly a century.

• 7. Ownership and the NordStar Sale

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  On the 26th of May 2020, Torstar's board of directors announced it had voted to sell the company to the private investment firm NordStar Capital. The sale ended more than six decades of Torstar trading as a publicly listed company, a status it had held since 1958.

  A competing bid from Canadian Modern Media Holdings arrived on the 9th of July 2020, valued at 58 million dollars. NordStar responded by raising its offer to 60 million dollars, ending the bidding war. The majority of shareholders voted in favour of the deal. An Ontario judge approved the takeover on the 27th of July 2020. One more legal challenge followed; Ontario Superior Court Justice Michael Penny dismissed that motion on the 31st of July.

  The transition came after years of mounting pressure. In January 2016, the Star confirmed it was closing its Vaughan printing presses and laying off all 285 plant staff, outsourcing printing to Transcontinental. In December 2019, all StarMetro editions, the rebranded daily newspapers covering Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, and Halifax, ceased publication. Jordan L. Bitove has served as publisher since 2020, taking over a paper now run under the Daily News Brands division of Torstar.

• 8. Notable Voices

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  Ernest Hemingway worked as a journalist for the Toronto Star before his career as a novelist took hold. The paper's roster of notable contributors across its history also includes Pierre Berton, Naomi Klein, Morley Callaghan, and Chantal Hebert, among many others.

  In 1984, scholar Wilfred H. Kesterton described the Star as "perpetually indignant" because of its social consciousness. That editorial personality expressed itself in election endorsements as well. In the 50 years up to 1972, the Star endorsed the Liberal Party in every federal general election. Between 1968 and 2019, it endorsed Liberals eleven times, the New Democratic Party twice, and the Progressive Conservatives twice. The two non-Liberal endorsements in Conservative years came in 1972 and 1974; the NDP endorsements came in 1979 and 2011. In 2011, while endorsing the NDP under Jack Layton, the Star also urged voters to vote strategically for whichever progressive candidate had the best chance of winning locally, to prevent a Conservative majority under Stephen Harper. For the 2025 federal election, the Star endorsed the Liberals under Mark Carney.