[2] Its first editor-in-chief in Jerusalem was the late Mahmood Al Sherif, then also publisher of the Arabic-language Ad-Dustour that started publication in Amman in 1967.
However, in 1993 it returned to the broadsheet format until August 2008 when a decision was made to turn it into a tabloid with a glossy cover and in full color; day of publication was moved from Thursday to Monday for marketing reasons.
It was closed down in 1988 after a government clampdown on the press, but resumed publication in 1990 under Osama El Sherif, the younger son of Mahmood.
Sixty percent of its readers were said to be Jordanians, including public officials and civil servants, those who want to read a newspaper in English.
While the sections continued as they are, Q/A interviews with leading politicians and activists become regular, and new columns were introduced such as "People and Politics", "Middle East Beat", "Scrapbook" and later "From Our Neck of the Woods" (written for about one year).
It being an English-language newspaper the editorial team had always felt they had higher ceiling than the Arabic dailies, which it utilised to its own advantage while taking care not to overstep the unspoken red lines.
It was almost living in the trenches; all the staff would work from the few journalists to the editors, and Osama El Sherif was at it tackling anything and everything that was humanly interesting.
Very occasionally The Star would have news that would be picked up by international wire agencies like Reuters and the Associated Press and distributed locally through such papers as the Jordan Times.
The decision to suspend The Star was taken by the government-appointed temporary committee following the resignation of the mother company's board of directors in July 2011; the reason for suspension was given as "cutting down on expenditure".
A number of famous people who worked for The Star had already moved on to greater things, including Jordanian academic and novelist Fadia Faqir, who lives in the UK, as well as CNN Cairo correspondent Ben Wedeman.
For The Star Ben Wedeman was the first to interview Israeli politicians after 1993 and 1994 when the Palestinians and Jordanians signed peace treaties with Israel.
These were very daring moving, and some of the interviews were picked by agencies such as the Associated Press, but the English weekly was criticized by Jordanian and Palestinian nationalists who were against the peace process, calling the paper as "normalizers", and "talking with the enemy".
For its part The Star carried stories on the anti-normalization movement, talking to people with different trends and perspectives, and point of views.