Anniston Star
The Anniston Star is a daily newspaper serving Anniston, and the surrounding region.
The newspaper is locally owned by Consolidated Publishing Company, which is controlled by the Ayers family of Anniston. The Star is Consolidated's flagship paper. Other newspapers printed by the company include The Daily Home, and the weeklies The Cleburne News, the Jacksonville News, the St Clair Times, and the Piedmont Journal. Average Sunday circulation for the Star in September 2004 was 26,747.
The Star is a community newspaper and the dominant source of retail advertising in the region. Its online edition offers the content of the print edition, along with syndicated articles from Consolidated's network papers.
The paper was first published in 1883 as the Anniston Evening Star. It traces its modern history to 1911, when managing editor Harry Ayers left to start his own paper, the Anniston Hot Blast. By 1912, the Hot Blast had become Anniston's largest newspaper, and was more than large enough to absorb the Evening Star. Although the merged paper was initially called the Anniston Hot Blast and Evening Star, the name was eventually shortened.
Early on, the Star gained a reputation as one of a small group of liberal-minded Southern newspapers. It was one of the few progressive Southern papers to support Franklin Roosevelt during all four of his election campaigns. In 1948, it broke with the Dixiecrats, who had taken over the Democratic machinery in Alabama, and endorsed Harry Truman for president.
H. Brandt Ayers took over the paper from his father in 1965. Under the younger Ayers' watch, the Star reversed its initial skepticism toward the Civil Rights Movement and strongly supported school integration, one of the few Southern papers to do so. George Wallace derisively nicknamed the paper The Red Star for its support of integration (which was popularly associated with Communism). It has consistently remained one of the more liberal newspapers in a state that has grown overwhelmingly Republican.
In January 2018 Ayers was publicly accused of having spanked former reporters Wendy Sigal and Veronica Pike Kennedy in the 1970s. He admitted to spanking Sigal, citing his "youth" and a physician's advice as mitigating circumstances for the offense.
References
- Lockette, Tim (January 4, 2018) "Star's former publisher acknowledges assault on reporter." Anniston Star