Serving area readers since July 4, 1896
July 4, 2016, special anniversary edition
The Star story Covering parts of three centuries
Editor’s Note: Douglas B. O’Connell, a longtime Star reporter and editor, originally wrote this history of the newspaper for The Star’s 100th anniversary in 1996. Additions and changes have been made to bring The Star’s story up-to-date by Adrian O’Connor, The Star’s editorial editor since 1992; Bobby Ford, a former editor who started in 1993 and is currently responsible for the paper’s digital offerings; and Assistant General Manager Thomas W. Byrd.
B
orn on the Fourth of July. It was on that date in 1896, 120 years ago, that 23-yearold John I. Sloat started The Star. It was the second daily newspaper he started in his hometown. It’s the one that has lasted — through three name changes and five generations of the Byrd family as publisher/manager. Sloat named his new six-afternoon-a-week daily The Star. It became The Evening Star around 1900, and Winchester Evening Star 14 years later (Dec. 22, 1914). The current name, The Winchester Star, appeared on the masthead for the first time on April 5, 1980. That was also the day the Saturday afternoon edition became a Saturday morning product. Twenty years later, April 3, 2000, the MondayFriday editions became morning editions as well. From type set by hand, a flatbed press, and a circulation of 400 at the end of its first year, the newspaper today is produced on a 64-page offset Goss Urbanite press with color photo capability. Nearly 17,500 people receive the paper each weekday and about 20,000 do every Saturday. Some read it without touching any newsprint, instead seeing it in a digital format on personal computers, tablets and mobile devices. Stories are created in a newsroom filled with computer terminals, not typewriters. Pictures, once drawings, are now digital images instead of photographs developed from film. Today, printed papers are delivered by adults in automobiles before the sun rises. In years gone by, a child’s first job may have been tossing papers from a bicycle in the afternoon. Times change. The Star remains.
John Sloat and the birth of The Star The first edition consisted of four pages and was little larger than a handbill. It cost 1 cent. T wo other newsmen, John Hoover and Vernon B. Gar ton, helped Sloat launch the fledgling paper. The Star’s future was at best uncertain in 1896. Sloat had created his own daily competition 18 months earlier, when he started The Item. Several weekly newspapers also vied for readers in the town of 5,000. Today, 120 years later, The Star has more than 60,000 readers and is the only daily newspaper published in Winchester and the surrounding areas of Frederick and Clarke counties, an area home to more than 120,000 people. Sloat was born in Winchester in 1873. He died in 1949. His obituary in The Star said he attended local schools until he was old enough to learn the printing trade on the Winchester Leader, Howard Gosorn’s
“Ma Winchester” first appeared in the Jan. 1, 1912, issue of The Star. Her image was based on a drawing by Neil Woods. “Ma Winchester” eventually became a fixture at the bottom left of the paper’s front page as a folksy daily feature containing comments on happenings around town. “Ma Winchester” became a casualty of World War II, not appearing afterward.
The first edition of The Winchester Star consisted of four pages and was a little larger than a handbill. It cost 1 cent. weekly Republican publication that operated from 1884 to 1899. Sloat was 21 years old when he decided Winchester was large enough to support a daily newspaper. He issued the first edition of The Item on Jan. 12, 1895. The four-page newspaper was printed on a job press on the second floor of a building at 14 W. Boscawen St. He would launch The Star across the street in the same block 18 months later. But first, Sloat sold the Item to Bernard Wade, editor of the Winchester Weekly News, 15 months after he started it. Sloat and his associates may well have been glancing over their shoulders as they produced that first edition of The Star. News — local news — was breaking all around them. A huge Fourth of July celebration to observe the nation’s 120th birthday was unfolding. Flags and bunting were ever ywhere downtown. Charles Broadway Rouss, one of Winchester’s benefactors — a fire company and the city hall bear his name — was in town for the event, as were crowds of Confederate veterans. A parade wound through downtown ending at Stonewall Cemetery, in part of Mount Hebron Cemetery, where the monument to fallen Louisiana veterans of the Civil War was dedicated. The Winchester Times, where Jennie Rivers Byrd then held the reins, estimated the crowd at 10,000 people, twice the size of Winchester’s population. A number of those in the crowd were brought to town by Baltimore & Ohio and Cumberland Valley Railroad trains. In the same edition of the weekly Times, July 8, 1896, the newspaper welcomed the new daily paper to town: “The Star is the name of another daily paper just started in Winchester, with Mr. John I. Sloat as editor. We have an idea that The Star will have rather an up-hill business at first, but if perseverance counts anything, Mr. Sloat will certainly bring it to the front.”
The Winchester Leader speculated bluntly about the new undertaking: “We learn a new daily newspaper has started in this city — [The Star] — edited by Mr. John Sloat. We wish it success, but we believe this town cannot support but one daily, and, as one fish eats up another, so it may be the survival of the fittest. Will The Evening Star eclipse The Item’s sun?” The answer to the Leader’s question was “yes,” but no one knew it then, especially Sloat. For The Leader had underlined the formidable task facing him. v Those early Stars carried a regular front page item titled “City Brevities.” This column consisted of short paragraphs, often only a sentence or two, about happenings around town. A few of the items: ll “A pedestrian had the misfortune to fall through one of Mr. Thomas Keating’s show windows last night with not much injury to himself but considerable to the window. ll “Her many friends will be pleased to know Miss Etta Kremer continues to improve, and that prospects for her complete recovery are very encouraging. ll “Mr. George Hillyard has cleaned the large dam at his place near this city. A number of fish and turtles were caught. ll “Mr. Letch Boehm is in town.” ll “Whortleberries are on the market.” Whortleberries? Webster’s New World Dictionary defines them as (1) either of two European blueberries ... and (2) any of various American plants, as the huckleberry. The local items from The Star’s first week appear in a Star editorial when it turned 95. That editorial also listed some things that occurred the year the newspaper was founded: Cy Young won 29 games pitching for Cleveland, and, Utah became the 45th state admitted to the union. Additionally, 1896 was the year
William McKinley was elected president. In the autumn, crowds in New York City flocked to moving picture shows, or “flickers,” as they were called. Across the Atlantic, Britain’s Queen Victoria was thinking about her Diamond Jubilee to mark her 60-year reign, which would occur the next year. In the first editions of The Star, Sloat was listed as local editor and business manager. Headlines were small. Ads were few. The pages were only about one-fourth the size of today’s. As Sloat’s tenure with The Item lasted just 15 months, so did his time with The Star. On Oct. 1, 1897, Sloat sold The Star — to a Byrd.
The Byrds swoop into the picture The history of The Star is necessarily intertwined with five Byrds. Richard Evelyn Byrd was the first of five Byrds to own/manage The Star. The strongest weekly in town the day The Star was born was The Winchester Times. Richard Evelyn Byrd was an owner of the Times. He and his law partner, Thomas W. Harrison, had purchased The Times in 1893. Harrison, who later became a judge and a congressman, sold his interest a few years later. Richard and his parents, Jennie Rivers Byrd and Col. William Byrd, shared occupational interests. Jennie was editor and publisher of the Times during the last part of the 19th century. His parents met in Virginia and married in 1859. The newlyweds moved to Texas shortly after that. Col. Byrd, a graduate of Virginia Military Institute and the University of Virginia Law School, become a newspaper editor, ran for the Texas legislature and was adjuntant general of the Confederate state’s military forces early in the Civil War. Richard was born in Austin, Texas, in 1860.
Col. Byrd returned to Virginia with his family after the war “broken in health and ruined in fortune,” his obituary said. Richard followed his father into print, the law, and politics. Richard was Commonwealth’s Attorney for Frederick County from 1886-1906. He was elected to represent Winchester and Frederick County in the Virginia House of Delegates, serving from 1906-1914. He was elected speaker of the House of Delegates in 1908, after only two years in that body, thus establishing a record that has not been duplicated. In 1912, he was the Virginia campaign manager for Woodrow Wilson, who was elected president of the United States that year. He retired from the legislature to become U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Virginia and later opened a law office in Richmond. Through most of his political and law careers — between 1897 and 1913 — he was editor of The Star. v Richard Byrd purchased The Star at a time when Sloat was falling short on funds. “The expense of getting out a small sheet like The Star was considerable even in those days,” Sloat later said. “I soon found my limited capital evaporating. An installment of $400 was due on the press. I had about half of the necessary amount and was at my wit’s end. “A friend, Michael Lillis, loaned me $50 without security, but I was still short of the required amount. One day, just when things looked blackest, Richard E. Byrd walked into my office and said, ‘Do you need some money?’ To this day that quer y remains one of the brightest memories of my life. He wrote me a check for $200.” That day began the warm personal friendship with the brilliant lawyer that endured as long as he lived. Thus to Mike Lillis and Dick Byrd belong the honors of rescuing The Star from possible oblivion.” Richard E. Byrd’s principal interest in publishing The Star was in editorial writing. “I had been a student of (Charles) Dana, (Horace) Greeley, (Henr y) Watterson and Charles Emory Smith, but Dick Byrd’s articles, always brief and to the point, completely captivated me,” Sloat said. “When he spoke it was with the tongue of a Demosthenes, but when he wrote it was with the style and grace and pungent power of an Addison. He could say more in a few words than any man I knew.” Despite Dick Byrd’s way with words, The Star’s “possible oblivion” in the fall of 1897 was matched and nearly exceeded in the summer of 1903.
The son saves The Star Dick Byrd was regarded as a brilliant lawyer and a writer with power and style — but he was not a businessman. He didn’t like to dun his friends and neighbors for advertising bills. Friends and neighbors are what they were. The city wasn’t large, just more than 5,000 at the turn of the century. Many, especially those like Byrd in a high visibility profession, knew almost everyone else. Walking along Loudoun or Boscawen streets, you didn’t meet too many strangers. The crisis reached its climax when the Antietam Paper Company of Hagerstown, Md., ended The Star’s credit for newsprint, the paper upon which the newspaper is printed. In 1902 Dick’s 15-year-old son, Harry Flood Byrd, persuaded his parents to let him quit high school at the Shenandoah Valley Academy on West Amherst Street to try to salvage the newspaper. The young boy’s first move was to take the Cumberland Valley Railroad train to Hagerstown to meet the executives of the Antietam Paper Company. He said The Star could not pay its newsprint bill and he was not seeking additional credit. He said that if Antietam would send him just enough newsprint each day for that day’s press run he would pay cash, thus not adding to the amount already owed. As The Star progressed he would pay the original debt. Antietam agreed. Young Harry Byrd would meet the Cumberland Valley Railroad train with cash in hand each day
See Star, Page 2
THE WINCHESTER STAR — The Star Story
2 Saturday, July 2, 2016
1896
1906
Buys The News-Item, a daily
May 6, 1907
Announces combining with News-Item and new Duplex rotary press and Linotype EVENTS PAPER NAMES PUBLISHERS LOCATIONS
1916
Nov. 30, 1906
The Star
1896–1897
Richard Evelyn Byrd Oct. 1, 1897 – 1913
17 W. Water St. 17 E. Water St. 1896–1898
The first issue of The Star is printed
1903
Richard’s son, Harry, 15, drops out of school and saves the paper with “pay as you go” philosophy
Star
Harry F. Byrd Jr. is in the Virginia State Senate
The Winchester Evening Star Dec. 22, 1914 – April 4, 1980
Harry Flood Byrd Sr.
Harry F. Byrd Jr
1913 – 1935
July 1, 1935 – Mar. 4, 1981
33 E. Boscawen St.
2 N. Kent St.
1910 – Jan. 1947
Jan. 1947 – present
1933–1965
Buys The Winchester Times Weekly
Richard E. Byrd purchases The Star
Harry F. Byrd Sr. is in the U.S. Senate
1926–1930
Harry F. Byrd Sr. is governor of Virginia
July 1, 1935
Harry F. Byrd Jr. begins an eight-decade career at The Star
Five generations of Byrds
from Page 1
at the station on West Boscawen Street, now the site of the Winchester Little Theatre. By instituting the “pay as you go” method, for which he later would become famous as governor of Virginia, young Harry Byrd brought The Star back to solvency and ultimately paid all debts. He had the paper in the black in about two years. Even in 1904, The Star was solvent enough and the young manager astute enough to of fer a promotion to encourage readership and subscriptions. In the first of at least two promotions, the paper on Jan. 1, 1904, offered a trip to the St. Louis World’s Fair for 10 days to a person and a companion. By The Star’s eighth birthday, July 4, 1904, circulation had doubled and Harry Flood Byrd was listed as business manager. He was 17. The Star’s masthead at the beginning of 1907 shows Harry Flood Byrd as president and general manager of the Evening Star Publishing Company. But he was involved in much more than just the newspaper business. It was about this time that he became manager in Winchester of the Southern Bell Telephone Company. By 1908 he was president of the Valley Turnpike Company, which owned the road between Winchester and Staunton, now U.S. 11. That was the same year, before he was old enough to vote, he was appointed to Winchester City Council and began his political career. He later lost an election bid for the seat. It was the only election he lost. In between, he went into the apple business in 1907 by buying crops of the trees, then reselling the fruit. One of his first such purchases was from an orchard in the area now known as Hawthorne Drive in Winchester. It was in 1907, too, that Byrd founded the Martinsburg, (W.Va.) Journal. He sold it in 1912 to buy an apple orchard, Rosemont, near Berryville in Clarke County. His son, Harry F. Byrd Jr., once commented that he would have done just the opposite. “I would have sold an apple orchard to buy a newspaper.” v While life was widening for Harry Byrd, so it was for the newspaper he managed. Winchester had three publications at the turn of the century: ll The Star, with Richard E. Byrd as editor and publisher. ll The Winchester Times, edited and published since the mid1890s by Byrd’s mother, Jennie Rivers Byrd. By this point, The Times had also taken over the Winchester Sentinel. ll The News-Item, a daily published by George Nor ton. The News-Item resulted from the consolidation of The Evening Item and the weekly Winchester News. The Star purchased the Winchester Times, on June 15, 1905, for $350. The Times’ last issue was published July 5, of that year. Subscribers were urged to turn to The Star. The News-Item and weekly Winchester News were purchased Nov. 30, 1906, for $2,500. v As The Star grew it began a march eastward along Boscawen Street. It was first at 17 W. Water St. (Boscawen Street was once called Water Street.) The Thanksgiving and Trade edition of The Star, published Nov. 24, 1914, said “The Star was first published in the small brick building opposite Woodward’s barber shop, on West Water Street, the building then owned by the Faulkner estate.” The Winchester city directory for 1898-99 in the Stewart Bell Jr. Archives at Handley Regional Library agrees with the 17 W. Water St. (Boscawen) address. The same director y also places the NewsItem and News at 4 N. Main St. (Loudoun Street), and The Times at 17 E. Water St. The Star’s first move was to the same address as the Times. The Star’s editorial page masthead for Dec. 10, 1898, lists the 17 W. Water St. address. The masthead for Jan. 2, 1899, gives 17 E. Water St. as the location. Annual subscription rates listed in The Star on Jan. 6, 1899, are: Times, $1.50; Star, $2; both $3. A single copy of The Star cost 2
1956
1947–1965
First appearance of “Ma Winchester.” Runs until WWII
June 15 , 1905
Oct.1, 1897
July 4, 1896
1896–1898
1946
Jan. 1947
The Star makes its final move
1900 – Dec. 21, 1914
John I. Sloat
1936
Jan. 1, 1912
The Evening Star
1896–1900
1926
Thomas T. Byrd president and publisher 1981-present
Thomas W. Byrd assistant general manager 2013-present
Harry Flood Byrd Jr. editor and publisher 1935-1981
Harry Flood Byrd Sr. publisher 1913-1935
Richard Evelyn Byrd editor and publisher 1897-1913
John I. Sloat founder and publisher 1896-1897
cents. By comparison, today’s annual subscription rate, 120 years later, is $118 and the single-copy price is 75 cents. The directory for 1903-04 has The Star and Times at 17-19 E. Boscawen (Water) St. R.E. Byrd is listed as the Times’ editor. The News-Item and Winchester News is listed at 33 E. Boscawen St., which would be The Star’s next stop. The 1914-15 city directory lists The Star at 33-35 E. Boscawen St. Harry F. Byrd is listed as president. The Star’s telephone number was 33, and the width of its building was 33 feet. A plaque on the building at 33 East Boscawen St. today says The Star was published from that building and address from 1913 to 1946. But when Har r y Byrd purchased the building in 1922 the deed refers to a lease on the property made by C.S. Baker, April 1, 1910, to Harr y’s mother, E. Bolling Byrd. It was “for a period of five years from date for a monthly rental of Thirty Eight Dollars and Twenty Cents ($38.20)” When Richard Byrd bought The Star in 1897, he titled it to his wife, Eleanor Bolling Flood, and it remained in her name for 60 years until her death in 1957. So, it appears the plaque on 33 E. Boscawen St. is in error with the correct date being 1910, not 1913. v
Major changes came to The Star in 1907. About six months after the purchase of the NewsItem, The Star on May 6, 1907, announced with considerable fanfare the combination of the two papers, and the purchase of a Duplex rotary press. Circulation was around 3,000. The Star featured, on an inside page, a full page presentation with the heading, “A New Era for The Evening Star.” Here’s how the newspaper phrased its opening sentences in what amounted to an announcement: “The Evening Star today is presented to its readers combined with The Morning News-Item — the form under which it will hereafter be published. The News-Item and The Evening Star were today merged into one, and the combined paper is conducted by The Star management.” It added that the editorial, reportorial, and mechanical forces of the two papers had been combined. An editorial in that day’s paper said the old way of setting type by hand “has given way to the Mergenthaler typesetting machines.” These were known as Linotype machines and produced just that — a line of type. An operator worked the machine sitting at a keyboard. Pressing a key released a matrix. A
matrix is a die or mold used for casting or chaping, in this case letters of the alphabet and numbers. Each key pressed released a matrix holding the letter or figure corresponding to the key pressed. When a line of matrices is set, the operator would push a lever putting the line in contact with molten lead from the machine’s melting pot. A line of type is cast and put into place in front of the machine. Each such line is part of a metal slug. A number of them went together to make a story. Lines of type were then placed into the page form. The Duplex press was called the “pride of the establishment.” In operation, paper was taken from two rolls and carried over the inked page forms and printed first on one side, turned over, and printed on the other before being cut and run through the folder. The press was operated by electricity, with a gasoline engine backup. The 1907 announcement said Richard Byrd “formulates its (The Star’s) policy upon public questions and writes most of the editorials that appear.” “These editorials,” the Star said, “have given The Star a distinctive and distinguished place in the press of Virginia and are widely quoted. ...” The story, which explained the entire operation of the newspaper, said, “Mr. Thomas B. Byrd, as the
manager, has general supervisory authority over the business and mechanical operations of the paper.” This refers to Thomas Bolling Byrd, Harry Byrd’s brother, who later became part of the Byrd apple operation. D.B. Conrad is identified as head of the local staff as city editor, “who has for several years written most of the news gathered in Winchester for The Star.” That lengthy account of May 6, 1907, said that John Hoover, “long city editor of The News-Item, is added today to the local staff and will assist Mr. Conrad in this most essential work.” His obituary in The Star in the spring of 1950 said Hoover had been news editor of the newspaper for 50 years. And it has long been accepted that he was one of those helping Sloat when he started The Star. At the time of the consolidation and press announcement in 1907, The Star had 50 county correspondents in Frederick, Clarke, and Warren counties, with special facilities for reporting news from Berryville, Boyce, and Front Royal neighborhoods. It also had a telegraphic service for non-local news and a special correspondent in Washington “who may be queried for important telegrams whenever the news justifies.” The Star’s 12th anniversary editorial on July 4, 1908, said that daily circulation during the past year had been 3,826. This claim is larger than several years later. The first audited circulation figure was 3,365 on March 31, 1915. That anniversary editorial also said a recent improvement was the installation of the Hearst News Ser vice, which provided 1,000 words a day from Pittsburgh. Harr y Byrd was identified as editor of The Star in mid-’10s. The paper featured a seven-column format, which it had since 1902. It sold for 2 cents a copy. As 1911 began, the banner across the front page said “The Evening Star,” and below that, “and Morning News-Item Consolidated.” This would continue for some years. v The Jan. 1, 1912, issue of The Star contains an editorial cartoon of “Ma Winchester” on the front page. The drawing was a product of Neil Woods. “Ma Winchester” later became a fixture at the bottom left of the paper’s front page. A few paragraphs of copy appeared below a drawing of a woman who appeared mature enough to fill the bill of age and wisdom. It was a folksy daily feature, containing comments on happenings around town. “Ma” made suggestions about a number of things, too. One entry, for Sept. 3, 1935, read: “Both Pa Frederick and I were pleased to read in the paper a few days ago that county school officials are going to insist more strenuously that children under the compulsory school age attend schools regularly.” “Ma Winchester” became a casualty of World War II, not appearing afterward. One of the familiar and popular features of The Star during those early years and almost until her death in 1920 was the column written under the byline, “Nemo,” in Latin meaning “no one.” This was Kate McVicar of Winchester. Her breezy comments and features appeared often on Saturdays in The Star. History was the topic for many of her columns, happenings around Winchester. A feature in The Star a few years ago said that during the Civil War, “her house was near the battlefields, and although she was a staunch Confederate, she tended to wounded on both sides. Throughout her life she corresponded with some of the Union soldiers she cared for.” The feature said she was Miss Manners, Dear Abby, Ellen Goodman and a local Rona Barrett rolled into one. She wrote hundreds of poems, according to her obituary. “Nemo” was protective about the city’s image, according to the feature. It said that “When the Baltimore Sunday Sun said Winchester had a reputation for being fast, ‘Nemo’ said, “We waited for some other pen than ours to defend our city ...; it is the fault of girls, known as ‘peaches’, who are silly enough to flirt with strangers ... when a town is called fast.’ ” v The “Morning News-Item Consolidated” line under the front page
See Star, Page 5
The Star Story — THE WINCHESTER STAR
Saturday, July 2, 2016 3
Looking back at Linotype
Former Star worker reproduced copy line-by-line on hot, clattering machines Star staff report
Mitchell O. Heironimus
WINCHESTER — Major changes came to The Winchester Star in 1907. An editorial in that day’s newspaper said the old way of setting type by hand “has given way to the Mergenthaler typesetting machines.” These were known as Linotype machines and produced just that — a line of type. An operator worked the machine sitting at a keyboard. Pressing a key released a matrix. A matrix is a die or mold used for casting or chaping, in
this case letters of the alphabet and numbers. Each key pressed released a matrix holding the letter or figure corresponding to the key pressed. When a line of matrices is set, the operator pushes a lever putting the line in contact with molten lead from the machine’s melting pot. A line of type is cast and put into place in front of the machine. Each such line is part of a metal slug. A number of them went together to make a story. Lines of type were then placed into the page form. Although faster than previous letter-by-letter hand-set type, Linotype
presses could be dangerous, often spitting out pieces of hot lead if typeset wasn’t aligned perfectly. “Sometimes the lead would shoot right out at you — you had to be careful,” said Mitchell O. Heironimus, 81, a retired Winchester Star employee. Heironimus started work at The Star on May 27, 1957, after serving in the Navy. His first seven years were spent in the composing department working with the Linotype machine setting copy for the newspaper. After The Star went to offset printing in 1964, Heironimus worked 36
years in the pressroom as the press foreman to complete his 43 years of service at The Star. Working in sweltering temperatures amid a cacophany of constant mechanical tapping, typeset operators of Linotype or “line casting” machines found it a slow, precise and sometimes frustrating process. “They broke down all the time,” said Bob Read, owner of Wisecarver Communications, a Winchester-based job printing company. “The mechan-
See Linotype, Page 4
GINGER PERRY/The Winchester Star
Retired Winchester Star press foreman Mitchell Heironimus (left) and Bob Read, owner of Wisecarver Communications, talk about working on a similar version of this Intertype typesetting machine. Heironimus spent the first seven years of his long career at The Star working on Linotype machines, which produced copy line by line for the printing press.
GINGER PERRY/The Winchester Star
Matrices (top), individual letter molds that might include the Roman and italic or boldface versions of typeface, were selected by the Linotype operator using a keyboard. Once a line of matrices was set, molten lead would cast the line as a type slug (below). The Winchester Star operated four typesetting machines during the 1907 to the 1964 Linotype era.
GINGER PERRY/The Winchester Star
Machinist and operator Oscar S. Brown works on a Linotype at The Winchester Star’s 33 E. Boscawen St. office in March 1946.
Bob Read (standing), owner of Wisecarver Communications, watches as retired Winchester Star press foreman Mitchell Heironimus types on a typesetting machine at Read’s Winchester business recently.
THE WINCHESTER STAR — The Star Story
4 Saturday, July 2, 2016
The Winchester Star’s office was at 33 E. Boscawen St. from 1910 to January 1947.
GINGER PERRY/The WInchester Star
ABOVE The Winchester Star’s offices photographed from the top floor of the Court Square Autopark. RIGHT The Winchester Star offices on Feb. 2, 1947. BELOW The corner of Kent Street (foreground) and Boscawen Street on Nov. 22, 1945, before construction began on the new office of The Winchester Star in downtown Winchester.
Star at home on Kent Street Star staff report
Too big for its home since 1910, at 33 E. Boscawen St., The Winchester Star decided to construct a new building down the block at the corner of Kent and Boscawen streets. The lot at 2 N. Kent St. was once home to Winchester Steam Laundry, and had been the location of the Kent Street Presbyterian Church, built in 1827. Gen. Stonewall Jackson attended services at the church while he was in Winchester during the Civil War. To add to the site’s history, in January 1947, initial construction finished on The Winchester Star’s new headquarters and its current home on Kent Street. Since then, the Byrd family has made five additions to the Kent Street business.
GINGER PERRY/The Winchester Star
Linotype operators set copy for The Winchester Star in November 1953.
Linotype
Mitchell Heironimus uses an Intertype typesetting machine at Wisecarver Communications recently. The press veteran said Linotype work, which used melted lead, was dangerous.
from Page 3 ical parts would get worn down and you’d have to stop and replace them. You couldn’t push a button, walk away and it would just fix itself.” Made of solid cast metal, Linotype printers were anything but quiet, producing endless metal clanking in the composing room. Despite the noise, most typeset operators failed to shield their ears. “Hearing loss was probably quite prevalent — nobody did stuff to prevent it back then,” Read said. “It was like lead in paint; we had to learn from it.” Read used a Linotype machine with his business, Wisecar ver Communications, but has decided to “retire” the Linotype to make room for his business operations. Considered skilled operators by trade, some Linotypists saw their job as more than producing a line of lead type. “I always thought that working here was something special — that we were producing his-
~
Sometimes the lead would shoot right out at you — you had to be careful. — Mitchell Hieronimus Former Winchester Star Linotype operator and press foreman
tory every day,” Heironimus said. “A skilled Linotype operator was really hard to find,” said Read, who owned and operated a Harris Intertype Linotype machine. “And it was hard to find machinists to keep them running.” But by the mid-1960s the days of Linotype print were numbered. Newspapers including The Star were replacing their Linotypes with newer technology that would allow The Winchester Star to go to the newest printing at that time, 1964, offset printing.
Winchester Star Linotype machines lined a wall on Oct. 6, 1946, in the newspaper’s office at 33 E. Boscawen St. in Winchester.
The Star Story — THE WINCHESTER STAR
1956
Saturday, July 2, 2016 5
1966
1976
1986
1996
2006
Aug. 1, 2009
April 4,1981
winchesterstar.com becomes the first paid daily newspaper site in Virginia
First edition printed on the new 64-page Goss Urbanite offset press EVENTS PAPER NAMES PUBLISHERS LOCATIONS
The Winchester Evening Star
2016
2016
Paper unveils redesign of winchesterstar.com
The Winchester Star
Dec. 22, 1914 – April 4, 1980
April 5, 1980 – present
Harry F. Byrd Jr
Thomas T. Byrd
July 1, 1935 – Mar. 4, 1981
Mar. 5, 1981 – present
2 N. Kent St.
Jan. 1947 – present
Feb. 17, 1964
The Star becomes the first Virginia daily to use offset printing
April 5, 1980
Paper now known as The Winchester Star. Saturdays now feature a morning edition
1965–1983
April 3, 2000
Harry F. Byrd Jr. is in the U.S. Senate
Star
Oct. 1999
The Winchester Star, is now on the Internet at winchesterstar.com The Winchester Star begins delivering six mornings a week
A 78-year career with The Star
from Page 2
banner name had disappeared by Dec. 12, 1914. Two days later, only The Evening Star name appeared. But on Tuesday, Dec. 22, 1914, the name became Winchester Evening Star. It would remain that way for nearly eight decades. Meanwhile, under the editorial page masthead, readers were reminded that The Star was “Consolidated with the Morning News- Item, Weekly News, Weekly Times, Weekly Mirror.” This would remain on the editorial page for a number of years. v In 1913, Harry Byrd began being listed as publisher on the editorial page masthead. Byrd, 26, married Anne Douglas Beverley of Winchester on Oct. 7 of that year. In the mid-’20s, the man who ran The Star moved to Richmond for four years. Harry Flood Byrd was elected governor of Virginia in November 1925 and served from 1926-1930. Richard Byrd, who had campaigned strenuously for Harry, did not live to see his son elected. Richard died the night of Oct. 23, 1925, less than two weeks before Virginians went to the polls. v Byrd’s move to the Governor’s Mansion meant more pressure back in Winchester on Ralph S. Fansler. He was The Star’s business manager for 38 years until his retirement in 1957. Fansler had lived in Winchester since childhood and started delivering The Star in 1907. Fansler, a World War I veteran, was named The Star’s business manager in 1919. During World War II, he ran The Star on a day-to-day basis while Harry F. Byrd Jr. was in the Navy. Fansler died in 1961. v The Star announced in a front page box Sept. 21, 1929, that it would go from a seven-column format on each page to eight columns. It was a “look” the paper would have for many years. Front page design, meanwhile, had been changing, with larger headlines and a move away from many single column headlines side by side as in the early days. Discarded was the “cemetery look” in newsroom parlance. Then, major changes and progress were slowed. The main headline on Tuesday, Oct. 29, 1929, said, “Wild Selling Wave on Stock Market.” It was the overture to what still is called “The Great Depression.”
In for the long haul Winchester’s population had jumped from 6,883 in 1920 to 10,995 in 1930. That helped keep circulation growing at a slow, but steady, rate during the depressed business conditions. “Individuals were buying a paper on a daily basis,” Harry F. Byrd Jr. remembered. It was good they were reading, because businesses weren’t advertising. Byrd recalled that 1931 was the best year to date for advertising before “the advertising went down and down and down.” It was not until 1945 — 14 years later — that advertising came back to its 1931 level. Four of those years were during World War II. Newsprint was rationed for three of them. Har r y F. Byrd Jr., the third Byrd, would be the publisher to see The Star through the Depression and through nearly a half century. He became editor of The Star on July 1, 1935, and subsequently editor and publisher for 46 years. Harry Byrd Jr. spent much of his time as publisher outside of Winchester either at war in the Pacific or in Richmond and Washington during a 36-year career in politics. Less than a year after his August 1941 marriage to Gretchen Thomson of New Orleans, the 1937 Shenandoah Apple Blossom Queen he escorted, Byrd entered military service. He joined in February 1942 and served as executive officer of a naval patrol bombing squadron in the Pacific. Byrd was elected to the Virginia Senate in 1947, where he served 18 years. He then took over his father’s seat in the U.S. Senate in 1965 and ser ved until retiring in 1983.
Harry F. Byrd Jr., editor and publisher of The Winchester Star, looks over some paperwork at his desk in 1946. He became editor of The Star on July 1, 1935.
Harry F. Byrd Jr. reviews a copy of The Winchester Star in November 1999 as the paper’s Goss Urbanite press runs in the background. Actively involved with the paper until his death on July 30, 2013, Byrd’s career with the The Star spanned 78 years. v The Star, on its 40th birthday in 1936, recalled for its readers that in those four decades, the paper only once failed to publish a scheduled edition. That was on March 7, 1932, when a “terrific snowstorm broke the power wires and we were unable to secure electric current.” That wintery day in March began a streak of 84 years and counting since the staff at The Star has failed to produce a scheduled edition. The Star published an Extra edition Sept. 1, 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland to ignite World War II. The next Extra is the one that almost wasn’t published. It was Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941. Editor Harry F. Byrd Jr. remembers he was having lunch with his family. The Associated Press called with the news of the Japanese attack on the U.S. Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Did he want to put out an Extra, was the query. “No, I don’t think so,” Byrd replied. He went back to the table and told his family the news. As he heard himself saying the words he then fully realized their impact. He said it was so inconceivable he couldn’t believe it. “Of course we’ve got to put out an Extra,” he said. He went to the phone and called the AP. “And then I called Ralph Fansler, and he rounded up as many of the staff as he could locate. By the time we got them all together it was 6 o’clock.” That is, 6 in the evening. Page mats were taken by car to Harrisonburg and printed at the Byrd-owned Daily News-Record. After the News-Record completed its early-morning run, The Star Extra was printed. The lead AP war stor y was the same for both papers. The only difference was in local news. Only two other Extra editions of The Star have been printed, the morning after President Kennedy was assassinated and in the hours following terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. The Star’s relationship with
The Associated Press has been a long one. The newspaper became a member of the AP on May 7, 1919. Harry F. Byrd Jr. was a director of the world-wide news gathering organization in the 1950s and early 1960s, and served as vice president. v The Star for years had delivery routes by carrier only in Winchester. It was mainly distributed by mail out of town. Byrd started four motor delivery routes in rural areas in the late 1930s. One ran north on the Martinsburg Pike and eastward. The second was on U. S. 522 and covered Gainesboro and Whitacre, returning via the Gore area and U.S. 50. The next one took in the Cedar Creek Grade, Middle Road, and Stephens City and along U.S. 11. The fourth covered eastern Frederick County and Clarke County. Today, there are 61 routes for delivering The Star in the city and Frederick and Clarke counties. The Star has five vans to deliver papers to city carriers, vendors, and stores. The circulation team covers nearly 2,200 miles each day. All of the carriers are adults today. The change to a morning edition in 2000 would mean the end of youth carriers. v It was in May 1945 that Byrd purchased the present site of The Star from C.R. Anderson. The original lot fronted 67 feet on Kent Street and 137 feet on East Boscawen Street. A new, two-stor y brick building was constructed on the site of the old Kent Street Presbyterian Church. Operations were moved from 33 E. Boscawen St. to the new building at the corner of Boscawen and Kent streets in January 1947. The Star continued to be produced, not missing an issue. Linotype machines were simply carted along Boscawen Street to the new location at 2 N. Kent St. The operation settled in with the business office and classified advertising sections just inside the front door, the news room to the right along Boscawen Street, and
display advertising to the left, or north of the business office. Immediately behind these facilities was the composing room with its Linotype machines and page forms, and behind that the press room and newsprint storage. Carriers came to the Boscawen Street door each afternoon to collect their papers. Motor route carriers left from there. The press was new, a 20-page Goss rotar y, replacing the press used for a number of years. The second floor contained offices. One suite was leased for some years to Gulf Oil. Members of the Byrd family, including U.S. Sen. Harr y Flood Byrd Sr., used the other offices. Since 1971 Classified has been a department of its own. It is located along Boscawen Street in the first newsroom. As the war ended and The Star moved to a new location, a new period of growth arrived. Circulation grew to 6,994 as of Sept. 30, 1947. Harr y F. Byrd Jr.’s 1945 decision to locate at Kent and Boscawen was a move that has positioned The Star in a favorable geographic location today. Frederick County’s government complex is across North Kent Street, as is the Frederick-Winchester Judicial Center. Rouss City Hall, is actually farther away than before, but still just a block from the front door at 2 N. Kent St. The Kent-Boscawen location has also allowed The Star room to grow. As of 1995, The Star became owner of the entire block bounded by Boscawen Street, North Kent Street, Philpot Street and the CSX railroad that runs along East Lane. This property has been acquired over a period of 50 years. Much of the block is currently used for parking. During the years since World War II ended and restrictions to development were swept away, much effort has been devoted to keeping up with publishing technology. That technology advanced rapidly. In all, the original Kent Street building has undergone five additions since its construction in 1946.
Aug. 26, 2013
Thomas W. Byrd begins his career at The Star as Assistant General Manager, becoming the fifth generation of the Byrd family to work at The Star
v A practice that slowly declined in the post-war years with the onset of television and growing radio coverage was that of local officials gathering at The Star on election night to learn who had won and who had lost. They would begin showing up a half hour or so after the polls closed. Election judges had been asked in advance to call the results in to The Star when the counting was complete. The visitors were non-candidates as well as candidates. They mostly were far more numerous than reporters. They leaned over reporters’ shoulders to see the figures, even as the results were coming in by telephone. Finally, one editor began making extra election charts to help the visitors keep track of things. They wanted information, but it was almost a social event. v In 1954 Harry F. Byrd Jr. established The Star Leadership Awards to honor deserving students from Handley, James Wood and Clarke County High Schools. His idea was to single out the student at each school whom best exemplified a combination of excellence of character, qualities of leadership and devotion to duty. Each school submitted candidates for consideration and the winners were selected by a committee of local citizens created by Mr. Byrd. The award was not based on need but was designed to help the recipient continue his or her education or to launch a career. From 1974-2005 Warren County High School was included in the program. The program continued to expand as Frederick County grew. In 1994 Sherando High School was included and in 2004 Millbrook High School’s inclusion brought the number of annual awards to its present total of five. Following the 2016 presentations last month The Star Leadership program has awarded 258 area students with more than $872,000. v In 1961 Har r y F. Byr d Jr. brought to Winchester, Jack F. Davis, a professional newsman with management experience that included being head of The Associated Press Promotion Department in New York, news editor of the AP’s Baltimore Bureau and chief of its West Virginia bureau. Davis would work for The Star from 1961-1973. Davis was a leader, a mover. He got things done and there was not an ounce of arrogance or stand-offishness in his personality. He was friendly and outgoing. He quickly became a part of the community and became involved in its affairs, even as sparks flew occasionally. The major thing, though, was that Davis and Harr y F. Byrd Jr. were always on the same page. During the latter part of Byrd’s service in the U.S. Senate, Davis became his administrative assistant. Davis arrived at The Star with the title of executive editor. Three years later he was general manager and executive editor, a job description that might have fitted Ralph “Fuzzy” Fansler a few decades earlier. Time was moving onward. Winchester’s population had reached 12,095 in 1940, 13,841 in 1950, and 15,110 in 1960. The Star’s circulation reached 8,774 by 1956 and soon was to hit 13,603 in 1966. One of Ralph Fansler’s goals in the 1950s had been to see the paper’s circulation reach 10,000. Then Byrd made a move that broke with the past.
Leading the way into print’s future Offset printing was beginning to be talked about around the industry early in the 1960s. Offset is a process that involved photographing type and photos pasted onto a page form, burning the page image onto aluminum alloy plates from a page negative, and putting the plates onto press rolls for printing. Pictures were clearer and type sharper, making the product far easier to read and quicker to produce. A name for the process then was “cold type,” as opposed to “hot type” with Linotype machines and melting pots of lead that had been used for so long. Byrd signed a contract for a new offset press in 1963, and in early 1964 Byrd gave Davis a “go.” The Star went to the offset printing process Feb. 17, 1964, the first six-day-a-week Virginia newspaper
See Star, Page 6
THE WINCHESTER STAR — The Star Story
6 Saturday, July 2, 2016
Star
Fathers and sons
from Page 5
to do so. The change to offset involved a new press with six units able to produce a 40-page paper, replacing the 20-page Goss Rotary press of 1946. This capability was later increased to 48 pages. The new press was installed in the first addition to the original building, jutting out from the north side (the massive glass siding is visible along North Kent Street). Davis had the ability to get people to do practically anything for him without leaving any bruised egos or feelings. It was a good thing he had this talent. The transition from “hot” to “cold” type was not without problems. They were expected, and those who expected them were not disappointed. The Star, during the first week of offset publishing, was just barely readable in a strong light. Before things got much better what became known as “Black Thursday” around the newspaper came along. The paper called for 40 pages that particular Thursday, a maximum ef for t for the press then. The bottom line is that the papers would not come off the press properly. That meant it wasn’t possible to produce a finished newspaper. Time went on and the telephone calls from disappointed subscribers began to get rather shrill. Then at 10:40 p.m. it was found the press folder was not synchronized with the six printing units. They were put back in phase and, at 10:52 p.m., normal papers began to come off. Davis and all of those on the printing end of the operation had a short night’s sleep. When Davis walked into his office the next morning he found a scribbled note. It was from a local attorney, William A. (Pete) Johnston, and it read: “Star light, Star bright, “I used to read The Star at night: “But now I find, much to my horror, “I’m reading today’s news tomorrow.” It broke the ice. It was funny and it became funnier as time went by, especially to those who were there at the time. But nothing was funny on “Black Thursday.” The frustration level then must have approached 15 on a scale of one to 10. But problems were solved, things smoothed out, and the operation became almost routine. Then it became routine, hard but routine. Offset is the method most newspapers use today. The Star led the way in Virginia. v Davis resigned from The Star in November of 1973 and went on to become senior executive assistant to Virginia Gov. Mills E. Godwin Jr. in 1974 and director of the Department of Corrections. Later he became administrative aide to Sen. Harry F. Byrd Jr. in Washington, D.C. He previously participated in several of Byrd’s statewide campaigns. A story from one of those campaigns that Jack Davis liked to tell: It was the Friday before Election Day. Byrd began at 6 o’clock that morning campaigning in the City of Richmond and the adjoining counties of Henrico and Chesterfield. His final campaign stop that evening was a 10 p.m. reception given him by the Greek-American community of Richmond which lasted until midnight. With Davis driving, the two headed for Winchester for a 7 a.m. breakfast being given for Byrd by his hometown friends. Traveling Interstate 95, Byrd spotted a large truckstop between Richmond and Fredericksburg and asked Davis to pull into the truck terminal saying “Tuesday’s election is a tough one and could be decided by one vote. I want to shake hands with ever y trucker in this place.” This he did until 1:30 a.m. But, when Byrd and Davis discussed it in route to Winchester the two concluded there were only one or two Virginians in the entire group, the rest being from states as far north as New Jersey and as far south as Florida. Byrd said “no more truck stops.” Another story from one of those campaigns survives in the mind of a few. It had to do with a musical (vocal) campaign ad and is at least two-thirds true. The piece was written by Nancy Friant of Berryville. One of The Star’s editors heard about it and picked up a copy from her. After running over it a few times on the piano, the editor and a close friend literally performed it for Davis over the phone. This was done two or three times. Then, the story goes, Davis sang it to Byrd while they were on the campaign trail. The first line of the commercial ran: “Harry Byrd is for Virginia.” The ad was used during the campaign. Davis ultimately retired to Stephens City where he served on the Town Council for a time. He died in February 1992. v The Star went from an eightcolumn to a six-column format on Nov. 17, 1969. This move provided an even simpler, cleaner, more readable product. Pioneered by The Wall Street Journal, Byrd was convinced it gave the readers a more attractive and easier to read
GINGER PERRY/The Winchester Star
Thomas T. Byrd (left) publisher and general manager of The Winchester Star, and Thomas W. Byrd, assistant general manager, show off the newspaper’s website and e-edition, which can be accessed by computer, tablet and cellphone at www.winchesterstar.com.
some decades after ward. Headlines are larger, the news type more readable, and more and better photos are used. Color photos and graphics make for a more attractive paper. The phone lines that were used to bring in news from wire services in the 19th century and much of the 20th, gave way to satellite service and now to the Internet in the 21st. News is compartmentalized in that categories such as state, national and international news have their own pages. Spor ts, once evolving slowly into a single-page daily, now is a section of several pages. What was called the Social Page with the kicker, News for Women, became the Living Section and now is called simply, Life. There are separate pages for comics and a Spectator page. Local news not on the front page is displayed on the Local page and others behind it. Classified advertisements long ago ran on the front page of the paper. Later they went to an inside page. Now, classifieds have graduated to a section of their own. v Richard E. Byrd purchased The Star in his wife, Eleanor Bolling Byrd’s, name in 1897. At the time of her death in 1957 she left equal shares to her three sons, Harr y, Richard and Thomas. Harr y Sr. passed on his shares to his oldest son Harry Jr. and over the next 60 years through purchases and stock sold back to the company Harry Jr. became the sole owner. Harry F. Byrd Jr. left equal shares to his three children, Harry III, Thomas and Beverley, the current owners of Winchester Evening Star Inc. Tom Byrd now heads the board of directors of Winchester Evening Star Inc., which incorporated in 1960. The company owns and publishes The Winchester Star and a weekly paper, The Warren Sentinel, in Front Royal. Tom Byrd is joined on the board by his siblings, Harry F. Byrd III and Beverley B. Byrd and three members of the next generation of Byrds; Thomas W. Byrd, John L. Byrd and Blakeley T. Greenhalgh.
Still meeting challenges Harry Flood Byrd Sr. (left) and Harry F. Byrd Jr. each ran the Winchester Evening Star and held seats in the U.S. Senate. Their Senate careers spanned 50 years, and their newspaper careers spanned more than 100.
newspaper. The Star was the first newspaper in Virginia to adopt this format. Before the move in November 1969, the last time The Star had used six columns per page was in the early months of 1902. Winchester’s population grew to 19,429 in 1970. The Star’s circulation daily in the city, Frederick and Clarke counties and fringe areas reached 14,726. This was paid circulation. The figure grew to 17,945 in 1976. This was the beginning of a spurt in growth in the area. The Star of fice also grew. In 1975 the area beside the new offset press was expanded for newsprint and circulation use. It was the second expansion of the 1946 building. Meanwhile, the Display Advertising Department had to be expanded on the first floor of The Star. Advertising went into the old composing area behind the business office, composing moved a notch back and the newsroom went to the rear of the building along Boscawen Street. Later it moved to the second floor along Boscawen, where partitions separating offices were removed. That area is a conference room today. Display advertising today is in the original composing room spot. Composing no longer exists since pages are created (or paginated) on computers. That process began in 1998 and eliminated the need to print out stories and photos, cut them, and paste them on board that would be photographed and turned into a plate for the press. Par t of the addition built to house the first offset press was later used by the page camera room and light tables where page negatives were stripped before going on to be burned onto a plate. The page camera disappeared when the composing room merged into the newsroom and computer pages were sent directly to a negative. By 2009, images went directly from a newsroom computer screen to a plate for the press. v Thomas T. Byrd, the youngest son of Harry F. Byrd Jr., was hired as The Star’s Business Manager on June 15, 1971. He was promoted to General Manager in November of 1973 after Jack Davis’ resignation and became publisher of The Winchester Star on March 5, 1981. He succeeded his father and become the fourth generation of his family to publish The Star. Including Jennie Rivers Byrd, his great, greatgrandmother, Thomas is the fifth generation Byrd to publish a newspaper in Winchester. Tom Byrd’s first association with The Star came when he was a substitute home delivery carrier. His supervisor, Carle Germelman, later served as judge of the Juvenile Domestic Relations Court. As a teenager, Tom Byr d worked in a number of depar t-
ments (press, production, advertising, and circulation) of the newspaper. He was a sergeant in the Marine Corps from 1966-68 and served in Vietnam in 1967-68. After graduating from Lynchburg College with a joint degree in History and Political Science in 1971, he joined The Star full-time. v The newspaper industr y has changed dramatically during Tom Byrd’s nearly four decades as publisher. So, too, has The Star. The first real change under Tom Byrd came at his urging prior to becoming publisher. The Saturday edition of the paper began to grow in acceptance in the late 1970s. And on April 5, 1980, the Saturday product became a morning one. The name also changed that day, becoming simply, The Winchester Star, the name the paper has today. The five-afternoon/Saturdaymorning structure stayed in place until the paper’s most significant shift came 20 years later. On April 3, 2000, The Winchester Star converted its Monday-Friday publishing cycle to a morning edition to better ser ve readers’ changing habits and advertisers’ needs. In 1981, the 48-page offset press of 1964 was replaced by the present 64-page Goss Urbanite offset model. The Star’s third addition was built onto the building’s north side to house the new press. Circulation in 1980 reached 18,962 for all six days per week of publication. By 1990, reflecting in part heavy population growth, the figure climbed to 21,032 for Monday through Friday and 25,493 on Saturday. The growing circulation meant a growing staff and the fourth addition to The Star building. A two-story brick addition was built onto the rear of the original building in 1989 along the Boscawen Street side. The addition’s first floor contains a large area for ad composition and business office space on the street side. The second floor houses the news department. A fifth addition to the newspaper’s offices was completed in 1999 for the circulation department bringing the total footprint of the building at 2 N. Kent St. to 40,912 square feet. As the paper moved into the 21st century changes focused less on newsprint and ink and more on digital technology. The Winchester Star entered the Internet age in 1999 when winchesterstar.com was born. It was offered as a free website until Aug. 1, 2009, when winchesterstar.com became Virginia’s first subscription-based newspaper website. Print subscriptions to The Star include access to the website and a digital replica of the print product. The replica, which allows a person
to view the printed product on a personal computer, began in 2008. That technology also continues to change and now the paper can be viewed on mobile phones and digital tablets. The paper’s first mobile app, of the digital replica, became available in April 2011. These dramatic and rapid changes in technology combined with the worst economic crisis since the 1929 stock market crash greatly impacted circulation and the entire business. At the end of the first quarter of 2016 The Star’s Monday through Friday circulation stood at 17,164 and 19,733 on Saturdays. v Thomas W. Byrd joined his father full-time at The Star on Aug. 26, 2013, and thus became the fifth generation of the Byrd family to work at The Star. Tom W. is currently the assistant general manager. He is involved in all aspects of the operation. The younger Tom Byrd graduated from Ithaca College with a degree in broadcast journalism, but he spent plenty of time working around print as well. Like most of his siblings and cousins he spent a college summer working in and learning the family business. He later returned for an 18-month stint in 2007-2009 in which he spent three months in each of the companies’ six departments working alongside nearly ever y employee and experiencing nearly every task first hand. He acknowledges that this process has proven to be invaluable as he makes daily decisions that impact the staff, the facility and the product. “My grandfather spent 78 years of his life affiliated with this paper and my father just celebrated 45 years since joining the business full-time. I realize that it will be nearly impossible to match their longevity, but I will forever strive to emulate their daily dedication and commitment to providing the community with a top-notch newspaper. I am so grateful that I was able to experience working along-side them both,” Tom W. Byrd said. U.S. Sen. Harry F. Byrd Jr. died July 30, 2013, at the age of 98. v People such as John Sloat, Richard E. Byrd, Ralph Fansler, John Hoover— and maybe even Jack Davis — would have much to take in if they walked through the newspaper today. One person they’d talk to about the paper’s histor y and changes is Adrian O’Connor, The Star’s editorial page editor since 1992. O’Connor is the longest ser ving editorial writer at the paper without the last name Byrd. He has also written more than 1,000 “Valley Pike” columns about the area’s history and its people and published a book from them. The Star in 2016 looks far different from the product Sloat first published, as well as the paper for
The newspaper’s 12 decades hold momentous events. There were two world wars and a crop of regional or hemispheric scraps, including the Spanish-American War that introduced the United States to world power status. The Great Depression bore down in the grim 1930s and beyond until there was war again and another kind of suffering. Then quickly came what was called the Cold War with the Soviet Union. There were decades of military buildups, threats, and spying, all against a background of the nuclear age. It cost Americans — and their descendants — a bundle to keep their powder dry before the Soviet Union and its puppet communist states collapsed from within. Since the start of the 21st century, we’ve seen the face of a new global threat — terrorism — which hit closest to home with the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. We’ve also faced an economic downturn closer to the Great Depression of the 1930s than any other since. The 120 years also saw the coming of the automobile, the airplane, the space age with man’s first landing on the moon, the ability to link people from around the world with the touch of a button and countless other technological and scientific advances that, taken together and sometimes separately, are mindnumbing. All of these things and more The Star has reported as it tried to mirror the world for its readers. The emphasis, however, has been, and continues to be placed on local news. Readers in Winchester, Frederick, Clarke, and adjacent areas get the news about their neighbors down the street or across the road as well as major events on the state, national, and international scene. Except for the 1923-25 period when the Daily Independent operated, The Star has been the only Winchester-based daily newspaper since late 1906. Although The Star is now into its third century as part of the local landscape, it cannot really grow old. Faces will change, but it will continue to be curious and do its best to present the news, accurately, fairly, and swiftly. It will mirror the people and events that citizens need to know about to keep intelligently informed. As the competition has expanded from radio to television to the Internet and mobile devices, The Star’s print and Internet editions continue to meet the challenges as America celebrates its 240th birthday. As the community has grown in population, the primary service area of The Star — the City of Winchester (27,543, from 2014 Census figures) and Frederick (82,377) and Clarke (14,423) counties — has remained the same. Thus, even as our entire community experiences change, and when the technology is refined, when the competition mix changes, when the reader/advertiser influences change, The Star will be there — to change when necessary and to serve. Always to serve.
Thank You! Readers, Advertisers, Employees & Carriers
Because of you, we are beginning our
121 Year! st
Thomas T. Byrd, Publisher/General Manager
Thomas W. Byrd, Assistant General Manager
2 North Kent Street, Winchester, Virginia 22601 • 540-667-3200 • 800-296-8639 • Fax 540-667-0012
July 4, 2016
www.winchesterstar.com
July 4, 1896
With Appreciation A Message to Our Valued Advertisers
The advertising staff of The Winchester Star
thanks all of our advertisers for their patronage. It is a pleasure to work with the individuals, businesses and organizations of the City of Winchester, Frederick and Clarke counties. As we start our 121st year, we look forward to continuing to serve you. Chrissy Hill, Advertising Manager Advertising Staff: Shannon Anderson, Pete Lynch, Pam Bell, Jamie Zirkle, Ann Whitacre, Pat Shane, Erin Mulvey, Karleen Spielman
2 Saturday, July 2, 2016
Celebrating 120 Years — THE WINCHESTER STAR
Star’s press keeps rolling Experienced pressmen make sure newspaper is published Star Staff Report
WINCHESTER — The smell of oil, grease, newsprint and ink emanate from the newspaper printing press room as the safety bell signals the press is about to “inch over,” a reference to the ink rollers and cylinders slowly getting started. The clock reads 1 a.m. — the nightly deadline for press foreman Glen Stickel and his five-member crew to begin printing the upcoming day’s edition of The Winchester Star. Pressmen work the length of the 90-foot press in The Star’s north building at 2 N. Kent St. They periodically grab newspapers off the conveyor, inspecting for proper color alignment, imperfections and overall product quality. “You have to be quick on your feet and be constantly checking,” Stickel said. “Everything must be balanced and aligned because if it’s a fraction of an inch off, the quality is going to be poor.” Nearly 38,000 images are transferred from a plate to a blanket to the newsprint ever y hour. The night’s production can typically be finished in 90 minutes to 2 hours. Like clockwork, this process of checking, adjusting and refining the final product repeats itself every night — except on Saturdays, since The Star has no Sunday edition. The press prints 15,000 copies of The Star on weekdays and 18,000 copies on Saturdays. In addition to The Star, the press is put to work printing heavy-stock jackets made of 55-pound newsprint each week that hold multiple advertising inserts, a weekly newspaper, The Warren Sentinel, on Wednesday afternoons, and at least one special tabloid a month. Established July 4, 1896, The Star is celebrating its 120th anniversary this year. In 1964, the newspaper became the first daily publication in Virginia to install an “offset” printing press, replacing the “hot metal” letterpress printing process. It’s called of fset printing because the printing plate never directly touches the newsprint. The image on the plate is transferred to a rubber “blanket” on a cylinder that is offset to the newsprint for the final impression. Letterpress printing used only ink, but offset printing uses ink plus water for each press unit. It is the correct application of ink and water that affects the quality of the product. The Star’s latest press, installed in 1981, has undergone several changes over the years to improve the final product and to stay current with technological advances in the industry.
Preparation is the key Arriving around 5 each afternoon, Stickel and his staff immediately begin conducting preventive maintenance — a most important aspect of their jobs. Newsprint and ink rollers are adjusted to assure a proper alignment before printing. The press is wiped clean of any excess grease or ink. The gears are lubricated to ensure a smooth nightly run. Ink fountains and water trays are refilled as well. Accounting for nearly 75 percent of their duties, maintenance on the eight-unit 15-foot-high press is essential to keep the nearly 35-year-old Goss Urbanite 1300 running its two 150-horsepower motors. Stickel said it’s much easier to maintain the machine through maintenance than to replace one of its eight units. It would cost several million dollars to purchase a new press, he said. Refurbishing units can be done for far less cost than purchasing new units, and proper maintenance is the best way to preserve the life of the press. The expenses of maintaining presses have prompted several daily publications — among them The Northern Virginia Daily in Strasburg, The Danville Register & Bee, The News Leader in Staunton and The Herald Mail in Hagerstown, Md. — to outsource the printing of their newspaper and scrap their presses. “We just can’t af ford to have anything go down during press time or we’re going to be in big trouble,” Stickel said. “It has some age but is still running good — preventive maintenance is an important factor in its productivity.” Originally installed with an analog format, within the last five years the printing press has had a technological upgrade to a digital
SCOTT MASON/The Winchester Star
Winchester Star pressman Scott Lewis walks along The Star’s 64-page Goss Urbanite press while a blur of newsprint flies through the press units and into the former and folder (at center), and finally onto the conveyor (bottom left).
SCOTT MASON/The Winchester Star
Assistant press foreman Nick Campisi checks over the quality of the paper while standing at the control consol. The Star’s press was installed in 1981. format, which improves its longevity and durability while eliminating the costs of scarce parts. “Some of the par ts are not made any more for analog and if you do find them, they are at an astronomical price,” Stickel said. “The whole press runs a lot better with digital drives — stronger and smoother. It makes the press motors run better.”
A cleaner image While the press is being prepared for the next edition, designers in the newsroom use computer pagination programs to place the next day’s photographs and stories onto the virtual pages of the next edition. The final designs are exported electronically from the newsroom’s computer system to a high-tech database in the production area that transfers the page images onto laser-etched plates — the first step in converting the pages from a digital to hard-copy format. These plates, made of aluminum, are sold for recycling after they’re used, as is the newsprint waste. According to Stickel, what used to be a three-step process — taking hours to create one plate that contained the images of two newspaper pages — is now reduced to about two minutes with the installation of the laser platemaker about seven years ago. “It’s less hands-on, and the fewer pressmen handling the plate, the better,” Stickel said. “It creates a cleaner image and the laser printer gives us a better definition of the color and black.” The Winchester Star uses a process-free plate, which is developed by the water on the rubber blanket when the press is first starting up, Stickel said. The finished plates must be used or covered immediately, since more than an hour of exposure to light will ruin the plate. Once finished, the pressmen carry the plates, each containing the images of two pages, to the press, where they are placed on the plate cylinders. “Now we’re ready to get printing once all the plates with pages are installed,” Stickel said. “At this point, we just have to start the press.”
Getting ready to roll Hanging from each end of the press are the newsprint rolls averaging 680 pounds each. The number of rolls at each end depends on the number of pages for the edition to be printed. When Stickel began his printing career at The Star 37 years
SCOTT MASON/The Winchester Star
Scott Lewis prepares a roll of paper at the end of the press prior to a press run. This is a partially used roll of paper. Full-size rolls of newsprint weigh 680 pounds and can stand 45 inches tall.
image appear too light and gray, while too much ink causes the image to smudge. “It’s a delicate balance that we have to find,” Stickel said. At a rate of 400 gallons a month, black ink is used the most during the printing process. Three soybean-based color inks are also used — cyan (blue), magenta (red) and yellow. The ink is called “lowr ub,” which reduces smudging by drying faster on the newsprint. On average, 100 gallons of color ink — including 55 gallons of red — are also used during a 30day period. “Red is a more dominant color, and it’s what makes the pictures,” Stickel said. Not a drop is wasted. The dirty ink in the ink fountains is filtered through a separation system that removes lint particles that accumulate from the newsprint during printing. Mix one 5-gallon bucket of dirty ink with four 5-gallon buckets of black ink, Stickel said, and an ink recycler — which holds up to 51 gallons of recycled ink — mixes all the ink together. The ink then filters into a 1,585-gallon bulk tank until it’s reused again. “You can mix anything with black because black is a dominant color and it will override all the other colors,” he said. Empty ink barrels are scraped of remaining ink and also sold to recycling. To maximize the smooth transfer of ink onto paper, the paper must maintain 50 pounds of pressure. The tension ensures that four critical aspects of the page are properly aligned. Stickel and his team grab newspapers off the conveyor after the folder has formed and cut the 22inch newsprint to 11 inches. The pressmen check for the alignment of page numbers, colors, margin widths and that photos are in registration — the method of correlating overlapping colors into one single image. “When we’re looking at the pages, you have to have an eye for the small imperfections,” Stickel said.
Hot off the press
SCOTT MASON/The Winchester Star
Spatulas smeared with ink hang in the pressroom of The Star. Several ink colors are used in printing The Star: cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, as well as spot colors like red and blue. ago, newsprint rolls were 31-inches wide. But over the years the width has dramatically decreased to 22 inches, which will be folded and cut to become the final newspaper width of 11 inches. Today’s newsprint is also thinner, going from 30-pound weight to 27.6 pound weight. “The lighter weight still gives a good quality newspaper, but with today’s economy and the way prices are, that’s what the industry is going to now,” Stickel said. “[The size] has been coming down gradually, so who knows where it’s going [from here]?” The cost of newsprint is by the pound so the weight of newsprint as well as the width are factors in the cost per pound. All newsprint used at The Star is at least 40 percent recycled content. Misprints and newsprint scraps are bundled and sold for recycling. The press room is kept at about 72 degrees — the ideal printing temperature.
Newsprint rolls are brought into the press room on the night before so they can adjust to the room’s climate. If the room is too cold, the paper will become brittle and could tear. Too hot, and it will feel wet and the ink won’t be fully absorbed into the paper, causing the ink to smudge when touched. “That’s critical — we must have the newsprint ready to print on,” Stickel said. During a typical run of 18,000 editions of a 32-page paper, four rolls of newsprint are put on the press. When the four rolls are depleted, another four rolls are placed on the press to complete the press run using a total of eight rolls of newsprint.
Ink by the barrel Ink, water and newsprint are the key ingredients during the printing process. However, like a fine recipe, the blend must be exact. Too much water makes the
With images and text transferred to newsprint, The Star enters its final stages of production. After passing through the printing units, the newsprint is fed into an upside-down triangle called a “former board.” Pages are then sent through the “folder” — at a rate of 35,000 copies per hour — where they are folded and cut to size. “The newsprint that comes shooting out is that day’s newspaper,” Stickel said. A conveyor belt car ries the newspaper from the press room to the mailroom/circulation area, where special advertising supplements are inserted in each edition. The newspapers are counted, bundled, loaded onto delivery trucks and transpor ted to storefronts, homes, mail and street vendor boxes. “From start to finish, it takes us about two to three hours to print each night,” Stickel said. “Since The Star began offset printing, it has never missed a publication, and it’s not going to happen on my watch.” Stickel said he is aided in this mission by his crew. The same team has operated The Star’s press since 2008. “I’ve been ver y for tunate so far,” Stickel said. In March, an audit was conducted on the press to make sure the parts were sound and running efficiently. “The press is in excellent condition for its age,” Stickel said. “And we’re going to keep running it.”
Saturday, July 2, 2016 3
THE WINCHESTER STAR — Celebrating 120 Years
Digital by design Star continues to develop newspaper for the future By TOM W. BYRD The Winchester Star
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or 103 years The Winchester Star was available in one format — print. On Aug. 21, 1999, winchesterstar.com was launched and The Star’s digital footprint was established. The front page headline in that Saturday morning edition of The Star read, “Click! Click! Star website takes Winchester to the world.” Those clicks immediately provided readers both inside and outside of the Winchester, Frederick County and Clarke County markets instantaneous access to the area’s news. At the time, 18 years into his role as publisher, Thomas T. Byrd stated, “This vast venture is entered into with caution, excitement, and a keen interest to learn more about this new technological development. A website, from my point of view, is a work in progress. It will have changes in style, content, and focus, as well as daily updates in information for our on-line readers.” Winchesterstar.com launched as a free website and the offerings were rather limited. In the days before smartphones and tablets most readers accessed the site on desktop computers. Some features, such as forums, photo slideshows and reader comments were unique, but most of what was found on the site also appeared in print. In April of 2008 readers got the chance to read exactly what was in The Star, just as it appeared in print, with the launch of The Winchester Star e-edition. This complete digital replica of the printed paper allows the reader to consume the news and flip through the pages on the screen just as in print. A subscription to the e-edition was priced at $5 per month or $60 per year. By March of 2009 The Star had 370 e-edition subscribers. In 2009, as newspaper publishers around the world debated how to integrate these new digital platforms into existing business models, The Star’s publisher made the decision to charge for access to the website. On Aug. 1 of that year The Star became the first paper in Virginia to implement a paywall, charging $2 per month or $24 per year to access content on its website. Three months later, The Star had 771 web-only subscribers and 576 e-edition subscribers. The decision was not without consequences. By August of 2010 visits to the site had dropped by 40 percent and page views by 46 percent. According to research done by the Virginia Press Association in 2010, expectations were that web-based subscriptions would plateau at 5 percent of circulation. At the end of 2010, The Star stood at 7.5 percent with over 1,500 paid digital subscribers. In March of 2011, amidst much fanfare,
Apps for smartphones and tablets make it simple to access and read The Star. The New York Times debuted its paywall for the first time, signaling a major shift within the industry. As of mid-2012, 16 percent of the 1,532 U.S. dailies had some form of a paywall. It has become conventional wisdom that local newspapers like The Star are best positioned to require digital subscriptions. These papers produce local content that cannot be found at national news outlets. Larger circulation papers seem to have also determined that charging for print content, while simultaneously giving away the same content on-line, is not a viable option. A 2016 American Press Institute report showed that, in a sampling of 98 U.S. newspapers with circulation over 50,000, 77 papers have a paywall of some sort. Most sites utilize a metered paywall which permits access to a limited number of articles before payment is required. Only three have a hard paywall restricting all content without payment. They are The Wall Street Journal, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser and Newsday.
According to the report, the average weekly price of a metered website is $2.97 and the average weekly price of a hard paywall is $4.43. The Star digital offerings can be purchased for as little as $1.25 a week (e-edition) or $0.58 a week (web-only). All Winchester Star print subscribers receive access to all of The Star’s digital offerings. The Star currently charges $6 per month or $65 per year for the e-edition and $3 per month or $30 per year for a web-only subscription. As of June 2016 The Star had 966 e-edition subscribers and 1,214 web-only subscribers representing 12 percent of total paid circulation. Bobby Ford began working at The Star in 1993 and has managed The Star’s digital offerings since 2008. “I always enjoy hearing about a couple where one person will only read the digital version of The Star and another person in the house wants to have the print version of The Star in hand. That’s what we’re serving, people who want the news we provide, but
GINGER PERRY/The Winchester Star
Thomas W. Byrd, assistant general manager of The Winchester Star, displays the paper’s website on his office computer and e-edition digital replica app on a tablet.
July 4, 2016
in different ways,” said Ford. “I like that the digital Star allows us to help people keep a connection to the area. I talk with people all the time who have moved from the area or are traveling, but are able to keep up with what’s going on back home because they read The Star online or on their phone. You can tell when you talk to people just how important that is to them,” Ford said. Naturally, breaking news events tend to drive the most traffic to the site. An average day brings roughly 8,000 “visits” to the site. Coverage of the protests that followed the shooting death of D’Londre Minifield on March 1, 2016, set the all-time daily high for visits with 51,094. The previous high was in July of 2015 during a city police standoff with an armed man that saw 31,080 visits to the site. Ford also manages The Star’s presence on social media. He noted that a two-minute video clip of the March 2016 protests was viewed more than 250,000 times on Facebook. The website works in unison with The Star’s newsroom but can also be quite helpful to other departments in the building. During the record-breaking snow storm that dropped nearly 40 inches of snow on the area in late January of 2016, distribution of the printed paper was challenging to say the least. The Star opened the entire website up to the public free of charge and the community had their news as they weathered the storm. Ford oversaw a redesign of the original site in October of 2011 and has spearheaded the latest redesign, which will be unveiled later this summer. “The digital age gives us the opportunity to be a 24/7 newsroom, where deadlines aren’t based as much on when the paper goes to press, but when the news is ready to go. Changes that we are about to make with our website in the coming months will help us get even closer to being that 24/7 newsroom,” he stated.
July 4, 1896
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To celebrate our 120th anniversary...
20 months for $12000 PLUS! An Extra Bonus Offer! Buy “A View from the Valley” for only $20*! * Book purchase must be made in person in our office. Books will not be held or mailed.
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2 North Kent St., Winchester, VA 22601 (540) 665-4946 • www.winchesterstar.com
4 Saturday, July 2, 2016
Celebrating 120 Years — THE WINCHESTER STAR
120 FACTS TO MARK
120 YEARS
The Star’s current editorial page editor is Adrian O’Connor, who joined the newspaper in December 1992. He is the longest-serving editorial page editor at The Star not named Byrd.
A byline is a line at the beginning of an article that gives the name of the writer. Under the byline is the paper’s name or the writer’s news organization (e.g. The Winchester Star or The Associated Press).
The most inserts The Winchester Star has included in a single edition is 40 on Wednesday, Nov. 27, 2013.
In addition to column inch rates, The Star rate card on winchesterstar.com includes additional retail and classified advertising options and discounts, as well as online advertising and preprint insert information.
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Currently, The Winchester Star’s longest-tenured carrier has delivered the newspaper for 36 years. 45
The Star’s first edition in 1896 cost a penny and contained 4 pages. Today it costs 75 cents. 2
CMYK is the shorthand way of specifying a full-color page, which is comprised of four ink colors - Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and BlacK. Prior to purchasing The Star, a daily newspaper, Richard E. Byrd was an owner of the weekly Winchester Times newspaper, where his mother, Jennie Rivers Byrd, was editor.
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The most inserts The Star has distributed over the course of a year was 1,763 in 2013. With an average of 15,000 insert copies per edition, that totals approximately 26,445,000 pieces. 71
At present, The Star does not publish on Sundays, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving Day, Christmas, and New Year’s Day.
In October-November 2001, leading up to the Frederick County Board of Supervisors elections (coinciding with a proposed industrial park in Stephenson), the Star published 395 letters to the editor and Open Forums.
In 1910, the paper moved a few more doors to the east, taking residence at 33 E. Boscawen St. (despite the 1913 date noted on the plaque currently displayed on the building).
The hot metal period of printing The Star (a technology which utilized various forms of Linotype machines to set text) lasted from May 1907 to February 1964.
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The Star has had five publishers: John I. Sloat (July 4, 1896); Richard E. Byrd (Oct. 1, 1897); Harry F. Byrd (1913); Harry F. Byrd Jr. (July 1, 1935); and Thomas T. Byrd (March 5, 1981).
Selections or quotations from an article are sometimes enlarged and highlighted to attract the reader’s attention. These design elements are called readouts, pullouts and pull quotes.
In its last move, The Winchester Star took residence at 2 North Kent Street in 1947.
In its editorial page content, The Star strives to devote, on average, 30 percent of its locally written editorials (“Our Views”) to Northern Valley and state topics.
From Jan. 1 to Dec. 31, 2015, The Star distributed approximately 21,000,000 copies of sale inserts inside the paper, based on an average insertion run of 15,000 per insert, per edition.
A dingbat is a decorative typographic symbol. In The Star, a four-part diamond dingbat is often used to separate the list of a meeting’s attendees from the rest of the story.
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A traditional newspaper measurement is the pica. There are 12 points in a pica, and six picas to an inch. Points are still used to refer to the size of set type, and there are 72 points in an inch.
Since 2009 The Star has used processfree printing plates. The plates require no additional chemicals or washing to prepare the plates for the printing press. 95
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Maria T. (Hileman) Montgomery is the first female managing editor in The Star’s history. She was hired in April 2008. The Star’s press time, which is the deadline when the printing of the paper must begin, is 1 a.m. Monday thorough Saturday. 97
It takes about two minutes for the platesetters to process a plate, and The Star uses approximately 220 plates per week.
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The city editor is the editor in charge of the local news section of The Star. The current city editor is Cynthia CatherBurton, who joined The Star in 1994. 99
The Star’s current building at 2 N. Kent St. was built in 1946-47 (see the image of the main entrance at left). Since its opening, the building has expanded with five additions. 100
The glass-faced middle portion of the complex was built in 1964 and housed the first offset press used by a Virginia daily newspaper.
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Harry F. Byrd was just 15 years old when he began working at the newspaper in 1903. His “pay as you go” philosophy saved The Star.
The Winchester Star’s circulation is divided into two general categories: home-delivery and single-copy sales.
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The Star primarily uses two editorial cartoonists – John Rose of Byrd Newspapers (based at the Daily NewsRecord in Harrisonburg) and Bob Gorrell of the Creators Syndicate.
A roll of The Star’s newsprint weighs 680 pounds.
Home-delivery is a paper delivered to a subscriber, whether by mail or carrier. Single-copy sales include purchases from vendors (paper boxes) and from local stores.
For most of its history, The Star was an evening/afternoon paper. On April 3, 2000, The Winchester Star shifted its production cycle to produce only morning editions.
On the front page of a newspaper, at the top, is the newspaper’s flag, or name. That area can also be referred to as the nameplate or masthead.
Each roll of newsprint is about 7.25 miles long. (Hagerstown is 40 miles away and that distance would equal six rolls; Harrisonburg is 65 miles away and would equal nine rolls).
A dateline doesn’t indicate a date, but rather is a location noted at the beginning of a story that identifies the place of origin for the article. Datelines in The Star are boldfaced and capitalized.
The Star marked its 100th birthday in 1996 by publishing a 10-section, 100-page special edition.
A two–story addition was built to the back of the original building in 1989 for the business office and production room downstairs and the newsroom upstairs.
The newspaper has been located in four locations, all within about three blocks along Boscawen Street in downtown Winchester.
The Star takes pride in printing as much local correspondence on matters of import as it can. This takes two forms – either Letters to the Editor (150 words or less) or Open Forums (as many as 500 words).
In 1981, a 64-page Goss Urbanite press was installed in the addition to the north side of the building. This press is still in use today.
Above the fold refers to the top half of the front page. Page designers work to get important stories above the fold where they will attract attention in vendors (paper boxes) and in store displays.
An updated space to house the circulation department and its insertion machine along with the covered loading bay was added to the building in 1999.
Keeping the four color plates in register on the press means that the elements on the four plates are perfectly aligned, relative to one another. This keeps everything on the page, including color images, in sharp focus.
An extra is an edition other than a regular one, generally published for extraordinary breaking news. The Star has published four extras in its 120-year history.
Each press run of The Star requires that the press stop once to place fresh paper rolls on the press. The stoppage, or “roll change,” occurs a little more than halfway through the press run.
Over the last three calendar years, The Star has published a total of 1,830 locally written editorials, or an average of 610 per year.
The Star uses six syndicated editorial columnists: George Will, Charles Krauthammer, and Richard Cohen (Washington Post Writers Group), Michelle Malkin and Thomas Sowell (Creators Syndicate), and Paul Greenberg (Tribune Content Agency).
STAR EXTRAS: Sept. 1,1939, Germany invaded Poland at the start of WWII; Dec. 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor attack; Nov. 22, 1963, President Kennedy assassination; and Sept. 11, 2001, the 9-11 terrorist attacks.
If a change to a page needs to be made after the press starts, but it’s not so important as to warrant stopping the press, corrected plates are swapped onto the press during the “roll change.”
The Star became a member of The Associated Press (AP) on May 7, 1919.
Inserts in The Star can be zoned by subscribers’ ZIP codes, meaning that advertisers can choose specific distribution areas for the insert. The Star’s longest running comic is Blondie, which first appeared in The Star during the first half of 1937.
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The paper on which The Star’s pages are printed is 22 inches wide. Each individual page is 11 inches wide, or half the width. 8
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Linotype machines were miniature type foundries that could produce one line of text at a time. Molten lead would flow into tiny letter molds, selected using a keyboard, producing a “line-o-type.”
Editor Adrian O’Connor writes a weekly human interest/local history column – “Valley Pike” – which has been a Local front fixture since March 1997.
The cutline or caption is text under a photograph or graphic that identifies subjects and describes or explains the image.
The Winchester Steam Laundry occupied the site of The Star’s current building at Kent and Boscawen. It was torn down shortly before World War II.
A beat is a general area or topic assigned to a reporter. The Star’s beat structure includes: police, courts, Clarke County, Frederick County, Winchester, features, sports, politics, business and education.
Ma Winchester first appeared in the Jan. 1, 1912, edition. Ma was the face of a folksy feature that contained comments on happenings around town.
The paper has used various column formats over the decades. Currently, the main section of the newspaper (the retail section) is divided into six columns per page, with news fronts divided into five columns.
The Kent Street Presbyterian Church, built in 1827, also once stood at the corner of Kent and Boscawen. Reportedly, Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson attended services there when he was in Winchester.
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A circulation mail and distribution room was added behind the glassed-in pressroom in 1975.
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The northern-most portion of The Star’s building was built in 1981 to house the current 64-page Goss Urbanite press.
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In 2006, editorial editor Adrian O’Connor published a collection of his columns, titled “Remembering Winchester: The Best of ‘Valley Pike.’”
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The Star’s yearly goal is to publish 600 locally written editorials, or 50 local editorials per month.
The Winchester Star’s classified advertising section is divided into nine columns. Tabloid section pages are divided into four columns.
Sales flyers that are included with the newspaper are called preprints or inserts. Their cost is determined on a cost per thousand (CPM) basis.
The Star’s insertion machine inserts at a rate of 11,000 newspapers per hour. It is equipped with 72 pockets that run under the machine and can handle as many as 12 different inserts at a time.
From 1998 to 2009, pages designed on computers were output from imagesetters that produced page-size film negatives.
Winchester Star motor carriers drive approximately 664,000 miles a year and deliver more than 4,500,000 copies of The Star each year.
Offset printing, a form of lithography which depends on the incompatibility of water and oil (i.e. ink), is the printing process The Star has used since 1964.
As the paper is printing, pressmen use a loupe, or small magnifying glass, to check the quality of the printing as the papers come off the press.
As papers come off the press, they travel via a suspended conveyor system. Riding on the conveyor, it takes 1 minute and 29 seconds for fresh newspapers to make the journey to the mailroom.
Page negatives, whether produced by camera or by imagesetter, were next placed in a machine that used a very bright light to “burn” page images onto chemically treated metal printing plates.
A freelance writer or photographer is often referred to as a stringer. Since stringers are not regular employees of the paper, their bylines or credits will say “Special to The Winchester Star.”
In offset printing, the inked plate cylinder is pressed (or offset) against a rubber blanket cylinder that makes contact with the newsprint, transferring the ink onto the paper.
For readers looking for food savings, the Wednesday edition of The Winchester Star currently includes the most grocery-store inserts.
The paper began as The Star on July 4, 1896; changed to The Evening Star in 1900; then changed to Winchester Evening Star Dec. 22, 1914; and became The Winchester Star when the Saturday edition switched to mornings on April 5, 1980.
The Winchester Star’s first office in 1896 was located at 17 W. Water St. (Boscawen Street was once known as Water Street).
In 1898, The Winchester Star office moved a few doors down from its first location at 17 West Water St. to a new office at 17 East Water St.
A dummy is a draft layout that shows ad positions and the available “news hole” on each page. Page dummies are distributed to editors approximately 34 hours in advance of the edition’s press time.
Of The Star’s 65 full-time employees, 33 have worked at the newspaper more than 10 years, and 10 of the 65 have been employees for more than 30 years.
The Star’s main news service provider is The Associated Press. Another primary news service provider is The Washington Post/Bloomberg News.
The Star was the first newspaper in the state to establish a subscription paywall for its website. The website was launched in August 1999 and the paywall went up in August 2009.
The Star newsroom’s top news management team is comprised of three women: Managing Editor Maria Montgomery, Deputy Managing Editor Robyn Taylor and City Editor Cynthia Cather-Burton.
A full-size newspaper page is called a broadsheet. Two broadsheet pages fit on The Star’s printing plates.
A doubletruck is a page where an ad or editorial content is printed across the gutter (or fold) of facing pages.
Advertising sizes are measured in pixels (width by height) on winchesterstar.com. Among the size options are leaderboard (728x90), medium rectangle (300x250), and mobile (320x50).
On average, The Star prints roughly between 85 and 90 percent of all letters received. Reasons why a letter may not be printed include libelous or defamatory language, or targeted critique of a NAMED business.
The Winchester Star’s longest motordelivery route covers 606 miles per week, or 31,512 miles annually.
Print ads (short for advertisements) are divided into categories such as retail, tabloid, display classified, and classified in-column. These categories indicate ad formatting styles and locations in The Star.
In recent years the Star has published the U.S. Constitution as a doubletruck to mark Constitution Day.
Syndicated content includes materials purchased from a company that caters to newspapers and includes TV schedules, national editorial columnists, Goren on Bridge, Dear Abby, and puzzles and comics.
The Byrd family has owned The Winchester Star since Oct. 1, 1897, when founder John I. Sloat sold it to Richard Evelyn Byrd.
In 1907, Harry F. Byrd founded the Martinsburg Journal. He sold that paper in 1912 to buy an apple orchard, Rosemont, near Berryville.
Print ads are sold using column inches as an advertising unit to divide space on a page. For example, on a retail page, there are six columns and the page is 21.5 inches tall. So a full-page retail ad would total 129 column inches (6x21.5).
The protracted controversy over a proposed high-tech industrial park in Stephenson (circa 2001) has generated the most local response on the editorial page over the past 25 years.
It takes time for a newspaper press to get everything aligned when it first starts. So the first 550 or so copies of The Star that come off the press are set aside. This “waste” is regularly sent to recycling.
From February 1964 through the fall of 1997, a giant camera was a critical part of The Star. The camera took a photograph of each paste-up page, which was then developed into a page-size film negative. 11
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For the other two local issues that inspired spirited community response in the pages of The Star over the last 25 years, please turn to today’s editorial page (Page A4). 19
From early 1964 thorough the fall of 1997, all pages were built via“paste-up.” Text and images were generated through phototypesetting processes (and later by laser printers), trimmed and adhered to makeup sheets. 20
The Winchester Star gets a tractortrailer load of newsprint every other week, totalling 65 rolls of paper. Each paper shipment weighs 42,000 pounds, or 21 tons. 21
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Only once has The Star failed to publish a regular edition: March 7, 1932, following a large snowstorm which knocked out power. Harry F. Byrd Jr. became editor of The Star on July 1, 1935.
In 2009, The Star began sending digital pages directly to printing plates using a process called Computer-To-Plate (CTP). Platesetting machines use lasers to etch text and images onto the aluminum printing plates. 42
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A full-page display classified ad on a classified page, which has nine columns, would total 193.5 column inches (9x21.5). A full-page special section tabloid ad (such as the Bridal Guide or Living 50 Plus), which has four columns and is 10 inches tall, would total 40 column inches (4x10). 66
An advertising rate is applied to each column inch to determine the price of an ad. Ad sizes are calculated by multiplying the columns by the height of the ad (e.g. a 2 column by 5 inch ad would total 10 column inches). 67
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The main phone number for The Star is 540-667-3200, or the paper can be called toll free at 1-800-296-8639.
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On average, The Star publishes approximately 1,000 letters and Open Forums per year. Over the last three full calendar years (2013-15), The Star printed a total of 3,071 letters and forums. 90
The current average size home-delivery route serves 185 subscribers. The route with the most Star subscribers has 442 home-delivery customers. 91
In May 2011, 94.7 percent of all winchesterstar.com pages were viewed on a desktop computer. By May 2014, that number had dropped to 67.6 percent and in May 2016 it reached 55.6 percent. Meanwhile, tablet/smartphone use of the website is growing. 92
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Employees who work around The Star’s printing press wear hearing protection at all times. When the press is running, the noise level is around 94 decibels. 116
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A sidebar is a secondary news story related to a main story. In 2011, The Star’s digital replica became available to subscribers using a mobile app for tablets or phones. 118
The Star pressroom uses an average of 400 gallons of black ink each month. Black ink is delivered to the pressroom by the tanker load and piped into a large storage tank.
The first sentences of a story are referred to as the lead or lede. The alternative spelling differentiated the word early in the paper’s history when printing technologies were reliant on lead metal.
The Winchester Star regularly recycles plastics, paper, newsprint, cardboard, aluminum, and printing ink. The Star is printed on newsprint that is manufactured using recycled paper and utilizes soy-based color inks.
The Star is one of only three familyowned daily newspapers still being published in Virginia. The other two are the Daily News-Record in Harrisonburg, also owned by the Byrd family, and the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, owned by the Batten family.
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T he Star Adapting to 120 Years of Changes 1981-2016
SCOTT MASON/The Winchester Star
Thomas W. Byrd (from left), assistant general manager of The Winchester Star, and Thomas T. Byrd, publisher, look over a freshly printed newspaper produced by The Star’s second Goss Urbanite press, installed in 1981. The eight-unit press is capable of printing a newspaper of 64 pages.
1964-1981
1947-1964
The first offset press at a daily newspaper in Virginia, this Goss Urbanite six-unit press was installed at The Star in 1964 and could print up to 40 pages. A unit was added later to boost its capability to 48 pages.
PRESS
1907-1947
This photo shows The Star’s Goss Rotary press that was installed at 2 N. Kent St. in 1947. The press was capable of printing up to 20 pages and was used until 1964 when the paper converted to a new printing technology — offset printing.
1896
This photo, taken in March 1946, shows The Star’s Duplex Rotary press that it had been using since 1907. The press was capable of printing up to 12 pages and was housed in the paper’s office at 33 W. Boscawen St.
This illustration was published in the first edition of The Star on July 4, 1896, and represents the Star’s two-revolution, cylinder printing press. It was built by The Campbell’s Sons Co., New York, and could print 1,400 copies of The Star every hour. The public was invited to The Star’s office at 17 W. Water St. to watch the press in operation each afternoon
THE STAR’S OFFICES
The Winchester Star’s office was located at 33 E. Boscawen St. from 1910 to January 1947.
The Star’s new home at 2 N. Kent St. was under construction on April 9, 1946. The building was finished by January 1947 when the staff moved to the new building.
The Star (near the bottom left of this image) was beginning construction of its new pressroom in 1963.
The Winchester Star moved to its new location at the corner of Kent and Boscawen in January 1947. This photo was taken on Feb. 2, 1947.
The Star’s home at 2 N. Kent St. has undergone five additions since it first opened in 1947. The current pressroom, built in 1981, is to the left, with the 1963 pressroom addition between it and the original structure. Three other additions have been made to the rear of the building, including a mailroom in 1975, a twostory addition for production, business and the newsroom in 1989, and an updated mailroom in 1999.
2 Saturday, July 2, 2016
Celebrating 120 Years — THE WINCHESTER STAR
JEFF TAYLOR/The Winchester Star
PUBLISHER’S OFFICE: Thomas W. Byrd, assistant general manager (Aug. 26, 2013), and Thomas T. Byrd, publisher (June 15, 1971). Father and son, they represent the fourth and fifth generations of the Byrd family to work at The Winchester Star.
Saturday, July 2, 2016 3
THE WINCHESTER STAR— Celebrating 120 Years
THE EMPLOYEES OF THE WINCHESTER STAR The Star has an energetic and loyal staff. We recognize our staff and include the start date of their employment.
GINGER PERRY/The Winchester Star
ADVERTISING: Seated: Ann Whitacre (Feb. 15, 1970), Shannon Anderson, assistant advertising manager (June 30, 1997), Chrissy Hill, advertising manager (March 20, 2006), Joyce Williams, systems manager (May 17, 1973), and Pat Shane (Sept. 4, 2007); standing: Pam Bell (Sept. 27, 2009), Jamie Zirkle (Jan. 5, 2015), Pete Lynch (May 31, 2013), and Erin Mulvey (March 24, 2014); not pictured: Karleen Spielman (June 27, 2016).
SCOTT MASON/The Winchester Star
NEWSROOM: Front row, from left: Jeff Taylor (April 7, 2003), Maria Montgomery, managing editor (April 21, 2008), Jim McConville (April 25, 2016), Ginger Perry (June 15, 1992), Derek Gomes (June 30, 2014), Amy Alonzo (Oct. 8, 2014), Rebecca Layne (Nov. 2, 2009), Sally Voth (May 13, 2013), Jackie Puglisi (Dec. 20, 2015), Cynthia Cather-Burton (Jan. 24, 1994), and Scott Mason (Nov. 6, 1978); back row: Bobby Ford, digital media manager (July 12, 1993), Robert Stocks (Feb. 5, 2001), Onofrio Castiglia (Dec. 1, 2014), Walt Moody (April 13, 2015), Robert Niedzwiecki (April 13, 2006), Jody Lawrence (Dec. 28, 2015), Chadwick Watters (Feb. 8, 2016), Melanie Livingston (Feb. 3, 2016), Josh Janney (Aug. 31, 2015), Robyn Taylor, deputy managing editor (Dec. 20, 1999), M.K. Luther (Nov. 26, 2013), and Christopher Early (Nov. 9, 2015).
SCOTT MASON/The Winchester Star
SCOTT MASON/The Winchester Star
CIRCULATION/MAILROOM: Braedon Collingwood (April 15, 2016), Timothy Miller (Feb. 23, 2016), Debbie Flynn, mailroom supervisor (May 17, 2011), Charles Leo (March 25, 2016), James Weatherholtz (April 29, 2011), Matthew Miller (Oct. 27, 2015), and Mary Lynn (Oct 1, 2004); not pictured: Sharon Tirado (Nov. 4, 2014), and Shanee Jenkins (May 24, 2016).
CIRCULATION: Front row, from left: Faith Wakefield (Feb. 10, 2014), Chloe Carlson (Oct 14, 2014), Joly Nield (Aug. 4, 2014), Stephanie Cox (Aug. 25, 2010); second row: Brenda Whitlock (Nov. 9, 2010), Lena Berger (Feb. 21, 2014), Danny Roach (March 10, 2015), and Isaac Yates (July 12, 2006); third row: Jay Sams (March 11, 2007), Andy Callahan (Nov. 15, 2010), Terry Goode (May 14, 2007), Todd Clemons (March 15, 2007), and Jason Crawford (June 27, 2005); back row: Bobbi Callahan, assistant to the circulation manager (April 23, 1996), and Bill Green, circulation manager (March 18, 2002).
GINGER PERRY/The Winchester Star GINGER PERRY/The Winchester Star
BUSINESS: Jane Funkhouser (April 26, 1983), Laura Hinkle (May 19, 1997), Susie Anderson, business manager (May 17, 2015), and Debbie Burke (May 5, 1986).
EDITORIAL: Adrian O’Connor (Dec. 7, 1992), is the longest-serving editorial page editor not named Byrd in the history of The Winchester Star.
GINGER PERRY/The Winchester Star
PRESSROOM: Front row: Glen Stickel, press foreman (June 3, 1981), Nick Campisi, assistant press foreman (Oct. 4, 2004), and Jimmy Dicks (April 24, 2000); back row: Ron Saylor (June 10, 1991), and Ken Norasing (Oct. 1, 2006). Not pictured: Scott Lewis (Oct. 12, 2008).
GINGER PERRY/The Winchester Star
PRODUCTION: Erin Robinson (Feb. 26, 2006), Connie Spaid (Dec. 3, 1968), Kristen Colebank, production manager (Jan 23, 2005), Shirley Harden (May 6, 1974), and Connie Long (April 1, 1976); not pictured: Brenda Sherwood (March 8, 2004).
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Celebrating 120 Years — THE WINCHESTER STAR
COMPOSING & PREPRESS
A Linotype operator works in the composing room at The Winchester Star. Linotype machines were miniature type foundries. Individual letters were selected on a keyboard. Once a row of letter molds was set, molten lead would flow into the molds and cast a “line-o-type.”
This was the composing room of The Star in 1943 at the 33 W. Boscawen St. office. This was during the hot-metal phase of newspaper production. To the right is a long row of partially completed pages. A page was assembled within a metal frame called a chase, which sat on a heavy metal cart. Inside this frame the page elements, such as cast type slugs, photo engravings, and lead spacers, were assembled and finally locked into place.
Lacy Mullens, compositor and operator, selects individual letters from a type case and places them into a composing stick in March 1946 in The Star’s 33 W. Boscawen St. office. Hot-metal typesetting, using Linotype machines, had replaced hand-set type for most of the text in the Star since 1907, but for tasks requiring a variety of typefaces, the old type cases and skilled compositors were still in demand.
A page of the Winchester Star is locked into its chase, or metal frame, in the composing room of The Star at 2 N. Kent St., in Winchester.
Once The Star made the switch to offset printing in 1964 (referred to as cold type), the composing room underwent a dramatic change as the Linotype machines were removed. In this image from the early 1970s, the workflows were focused on typing and paste-up. Typing was done on typewriter-like machines that perforated punch tape. The punch tape was then loaded into Compugraphics phototypesetting machines, which can be seen at left in the rear of the room, that would create galleys of text though a photo development process. Photographs and graphics also were processed through halftone and photoduplication processes. All of these elements were then placed on makeup pages — a process called paste-up, as seen on the foreground table — using wax to adhere the trimmed photographic paper elements to the gridded sheets. These paste-ups would then be photographed with a large camera, and the resulting negative used to produce a printing plate. Employees in this photo were (at rear, from left to right) Sherry Bosley, Connie Spaid, Alice Shaw, Toni Law, Joanne Muia, and (foreground) Pat Brill and Bud Cooper.
In this image from the early 1990s, an HP Vectra desktop computer (right) sits next to a Compugraphics photostypsetting terminal. The computer was loaded with the Dewar editorial system, a DOS-based program that formatted text and archived articles. Text was printed from laser printers for use in page paste-up.
Gayle Motley works on an ad for Wilkins’ Shoe Center in 1996 in The Star’s production department. Macintosh computers came to The Star around 1986 and were first used to draw and design news graphics and then to type-set help wanted ads. By the time this photo was taken, all the advertisements at The Star were being typed and designed on Macintosh computers using QuarkXPress software.
From 1998 to 2009, these imagesetters were used to create film negatives of the paper’s pages. Pages were designed on computers using desktop publishing software, and then the pages were digitally “ripped” through a Raster Image Processor server. The resulting detailed image of the page was exposed onto film in the ECRM imagesetter (left portion) which was then developed and output by the processing unit at right. The page negative would then be used to burn an image onto a printing plate.
Pressman Jimmy Dicks picks up an aluminum printing plate on June 20 that has been processed by The Star’s Kodak Trendsetter NEWS platesetter. The platesetters, installed at The Star in 2009, use a laser to etch the page images onto printing plates. In the background is the monitor for the computer server that is connected to the platesetter. The plate is a Kodak Sonara NEWS process-free plate which does not require additional washing prior to being placed on the press. The plate only needs to be punched and the edges bent and then it is ready for printing.
Editor Melissa Davis stands next to Compugraphics phototypsetting equipment at the Star in the early 1990s. Phototypesetting had moved beyond punch tape to these computer-like terminals (in background) on which text was typed and then transmitted to the large box-like units where it was exposed onto photographic paper. The photographic paper was then fed into a developer (at right). After a series of chemical baths, it emerged ready for paste-up. In this image, next to the typesetting terminals, are new desktop computers as The Star was transitioning away from phototypesetting.
Copy editor Melanie Livingston designs a page using Adobe InDesign layout software on June 22. The Star transitioned to digital page design, a process called pagination, in late 1997 with the installation of the Good News layout and database system. As a result of pagination, editors began assembling their own pages. After several upgrades of the GN software, The Star moved to a new editorial database in 2016 with the installation of APT’s Falcon Editorial and subsequently shifted its page layout workflow to InDesign.
The Star composing room in 1996, as compositors Pat Brill (from left) and Brenda Sherwood assemble pages. Photoduplication equipment had given way to desktop computers and laser printers at this point, but the final paste-up of pages was still dependent on scissors, X-Acto knives and border tape, as neatly trimmed text, graphics and half-toned photographs were adhered to gridded makeup pages. This space in the 2 N. Kent St. building was originally the press room, and later the newsroom, before housing the page composition area. SCOTT MASON/The Winchester Star