Star is an American
celebrity tabloid magazine.
History
Star was founded by
Rupert Murdoch in 1974 as competition to the
tabloid National Enquirer with its headquarters in New York City. In the late 1980s it moved its offices to
Tarrytown, NY and in 1990 Murdoch sold the magazine to
The Enquirer's parent company
American Media Inc. (Murdoch now owns the
New York Post, which, although it has more of a regional, news-centered focus, still has significant celebrity coverage.)
Originally an unstapled, inexpensive,
supermarket tabloid printed on
newsprint, Star was hugely successful but remained in the shadow of its longer-established stablemate. Along with the
Enquirer its circulation declined with the advent of celebrity-driven television shows such as
Entertainment Tonight and
Hard Copy.
In 1999, AMI was bought by investors fronted by David Pecker, who personally pledged that
Star would never relocate to Florida, the home state of all the country's other tabloids. However it took Pecker less than a year to renege on his promise and
Star was moved into AMI's headquarters in
Boca Raton, Florida, sharing the building with the
Enquirer and AMI's other recently acquired titles
Globe,
National Examiner, and
Sun. Editor Phil Bunton was replaced before the move when he angered Pecker by telling the
New York Post: "It's going to be open warfare. How we're going to all work together I don't know. It's like having the
Bosnians,
Croats, the
Jews and
Arabs all together in the same...
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