The Evening Star of 1892 and the editor who renamed it.

The Toronto Star did not begin under the name it carries today. The paper’s own history page, as archived in September 2023, says The Evening Star was born on 3 November 1892, created almost overnight by printers and apprentices who had been locked out of the Toronto afternoon paper The News during a labour dispute. The same page says the opening issue carried the slogan “A Paper For The People” on page one and was printed in the offices of The World on Yonge Street.

English Wikipedia gives the same origin. It says the paper was created in 1892 by striking News printers and writers, led by Horatio Clarence Hocken, who became its founder, and that it was printed on World presses in its early weeks. According to that article, Hocken sold out within the year, several owners followed, and the railway entrepreneur William Mackenzie bought the paper in 1896. The Star’s history page adds that publication was suspended during the panic of 1893 and resumed under new owner William J. Gage.

A central figure in the paper’s history arrived at the end of the decade. The Star’s history page says Joseph E. Atkinson was appointed editor on 13 December 1899, and that his name appeared in the masthead on 21 December 1899. English Wikipedia dates his purchase of the paper to the same 13 December and says he served as editor from 1899 until 1948, becoming its controlling shareholder along the way.

Atkinson changed both the page and the name. The paper’s history page says advertisements were moved off the front page to make room for broader news coverage, sports pages were made livelier, and, with its name slightly altered, the paper appeared as The Toronto Daily Star. English Wikipedia dates that renaming to 1900. In the same period, the Star added a weekend magazine, The Star Weekly, published from 1910 to 1973, and ran its own radio station, CFCA, from 1922 to 1933, English Wikipedia says.

After Atkinson, the paper passed to trustees. The Star’s history page says his will left the paper to a charitable foundation he had set up in 1942, and that a change in Ontario law later limited such foundations’ holdings in profit-making businesses, so the trustees were given court permission to buy the paper themselves in 1958. English Wikipedia says the parent company, Torstar, was publicly traded from 1958 until 2020.

New names in 1971 and 2002, and a redesign that was reversed.

The title shortened again in 1971. English Wikipedia says the paper was renamed The Toronto Star that year and moved from its building at 80 King Street West, which dated from 1929, to a modern office tower in the International style at One Yonge Street, by Queens Quay. The older King Street building was demolished to make room for First Canadian Place, according to the same article.

The paper then grew new editions. English Wikipedia says a Sunday edition, The Sunday Star, was launched on 16 October 1977, and that a morning edition followed in 1981. In 1992, the printing plant moved from One Yonge Street to a new press centre in Vaughan, north of the city, the same article says.

The masthead changed in 2002. English Wikipedia says that in September 2002 the logo was changed and the word “The” was dropped from the masthead, leaving the title as Toronto Star. The article also says that, until the mid-2000s, the front page carried almost no third-party advertising beyond lottery jackpot estimates, a page habit that echoes Atkinson’s move of advertisements off page one at the start of the century.

The layout itself was tested in 2007. English Wikipedia says that on 28 May 2007 the Star unveiled a redesigned paper with larger type, narrower pages, fewer and shorter articles, renamed sections and a stronger focus on local news. The Star published its own note to readers about the changes on the same date. On 1 January 2009, the article says, the paper reverted to its previous format. A free afternoon edition in PDF form, Star P.M., was discontinued in October 2007.

The paper also left its tower. English Wikipedia says the Star sold the One Yonge Street building in 2000 and kept renting space there, and that in November 2022 it moved its headquarters to The Well, a development on Spadina Avenue at Front Street. The Star’s own history page, as archived in 2023, lists earlier homes on Adelaide Street West and King Street West, each tied to a stage of the paper’s growth.

Through these moves, the shape of the name stayed consistent: The Evening Star in 1892, The Toronto Daily Star from 1900, The Toronto Star from 1971 and, since 2002, Toronto Star on the masthead without the article.

A nameplate, a text face and a fixed order on the page.

A newspaper’s title can stay fixed while the pages beneath it change. English Wikipedia says the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, first published in Frankfurt on 1 November 1949, altered its traditional layout on 5 October 2007 to carry colour photographs on the front page and replaced blackletter type everywhere except the nameplate. German Wikipedia says the lettering of that title, designed by Regina May, has stayed typographically unchanged, and that in October 2011 the paper’s website gave up its own logo for the printed Fraktur head.

A change of page size works the same way. English Wikipedia says The Sydney Morning Herald, a Sydney title since 1831, moved its weekday paper from broadsheet to compact with effect from March 2013, following The Times in London, and printed its Saturday edition as a broadsheet for the last time on 22 February 2014. The name at the top, fixed since 1842, carried across to the smaller sheet. When reading a newspaper’s identity, look at which parts of the masthead have stayed unchanged, which parts of the page were redrawn, and the dates on which each change was made.

A parent company taken private, and a name that kept shortening.

The current owners arrived in 2020. CBC News, carrying a report by The Canadian Press dated 26 May 2020, said Torstar Corp., the owner of the Toronto Star, had agreed to be sold to NordStar Capital, and that the transaction would take the company private. The report said NordStar was controlled by Jordan Bitove and Paul Rivett and wholly owned by the Bitove and Rivett families, and that John Honderich was chair of Torstar’s board at the time.

The Globe and Mail, in a report by Jeffrey Jones published on 28 July 2020, said an Ontario judge had approved NordStar’s acquisition of the company that publishes the Toronto Star and other newspapers, and that Torstar intended to complete the transaction on 30 July. The same report said NordStar had secured commitments from Torstar’s major shareholder and from the families that controlled its voting trust. English Wikipedia says Torstar was a publicly traded company from 1958 until NordStar acquired it in 2020, and that the newspaper is now operated by Daily News Brands, a Torstar division.

NordStar has owned Torstar, and through it the Toronto Star, since 2020. The paper’s headquarters, by then at The Well on Spadina Avenue, and its printing arrangements have both changed in the years either side of that sale, while the masthead set in 2002 has carried on.

The Star’s name tells a story of its own. Each renaming took a word away or added a place: The Evening Star of 1892 became The Toronto Daily Star in 1900, The Toronto Star in 1971 and Toronto Star in 2002. The paper’s history page traces the opening slogan, “A Paper For The People”, to its opening front page, and English Wikipedia records the 2007 experiment with larger type and narrower pages, and the return to the previous format in 2009.

For a design guide, Toronto Star shows how a city daily can shorten its name in steps over more than a century while keeping the single word Star at its centre, and how a redesign can be tried and reversed. Compare The Globe and Mail, another Toronto daily, or The New York Times. For this guide we use grey, blue and night with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Toronto Star’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.