Thursday 18/03/2010: Research on Express & Star newspaper

The Express & Star was founded in Wolverhampton in the 1880s by the Scottish American millionaire ‘Andrew Carnegie’ and a group of radical liberty party members including Thomas Graham. Carnegie’s aim was to campaign, through a string of regional daily newspapers, for the creation of a British Republic. His dream was to sack the monarchy, scrap the House of Lords and destroy every vestige of privilege in the land. By 1902 Carnegie had abandoned his mission and the newspaper has been owned by the Graham Family ever since. In the 1980s it paved the way for the computer revolution in the British newspaper industry and has remained in the forefront of publishing technology. The Express & Star has steadily overtaken its rivals to become the biggest-selling regional evening newspaper in Britain.

There is also an Express & Star sister paper called Shropshire Star which is based Shropshire and mid Wales, printing six editions per day, six days per week. Starting in 1964, when the Shropshire newspaper was the first evening newspaper in Europe, to be printed by offset. The readers have a particularly close affiliation with the newspaper. Within the circulation area, the Shropshire Star has an average issue readership of 223,000 adults, which represents 54% of the total adult population. Midlands News Association, which owns the express and star, also operates three commercial radio stations such as: Telford FM, Severn FM and The Wyre FM.

John Frederick Feeney originally published the ‘Birmingham Post’ newspaper under the name ‘Daily Post’ in Birmingham in 1857. This was the biggest selling broadsheet newspaper in the West Midlands, though it faced little if any competition in this category. In 1946 the paper stopped using advertisements on its front page and then replaced them with front-page news. The newspaper also changed to tabloid size in 2008. The post and Mail building, Birmingham opened in 1965 to accommodate the Post and Evening Mail newspapers, but The Post and is sister titles relocated to the restored Fort Dunlop building, three miles out of the city centre. After changing hands many times, the newspaper is now part of the Trinity mirror group. In February 2008 the newspaper re-launched its website as birminghampost.net. Then the paper moved to weekly publication in November 2009.