William Randolph Hearst built an empire on a paper won in a gambling debt
The San Francisco Examiner came to Senator George Hearst as payment of a gambling debt. His son William, freshly expelled from Harvard, took it over in 1887 and used it as the launchpad for a media empire of nearly 30 newspapers, a bruising circulation war with Joseph Pulitzer, and the style known as yellow journalism.
Hearst was born in San Francisco on April 29, 1863, to George Hearst, a millionaire mine owner who later became a US senator, and his much younger wife Phoebe. After St. Paul's School in New Hampshire he went to Harvard in 1885, where he joined the Lampoon and the Hasty Pudding Theatricals and threw huge beer parties, until pranks such as sending professors chamber pots bearing their portraits got him expelled.
Taking charge of the Examiner, he dreamed of a coast-to-coast chain and knew it required conquering New York. In 1895, backed by his widowed mother, he bought the failing Morning Journal, a penny paper up against 16 other big dailies. He paid well, gave writers page-one bylines, hired Stephen Crane, and lured away Pulitzer's entire Sunday staff, including the cartoonist Richard Outcault, whose Yellow Kid comic gave the era's brash journalism its name. The Journal's motto boasted that while others talk, it acts.
The war with Pulitzer's World, which cut its price to a penny to compete, featured giant headlines and lurid stories of crime and scandal. The biographer Kenneth Whyte argues the Journal was actually a demanding paper for its time, and that Hearst helped pioneer the mix of viewpoints found on modern op-ed pages. Both papers bled money covering the Spanish–American War and called a truce late in 1898; Hearst probably lost millions in his first three years before the Journal turned a profit.
Politics pulled at him too. He won two terms in Congress as a Democrat but failed in bids for president in 1904, mayor of New York and governor. A progressive champion of workers early on, he turned conservative and isolationist after 1918. In the 1930s he gave Nazi Germany favourable coverage and space for leading Nazis to write; from 1938 he condemned the regime's treatment of Jews. At its peak his press reached 20 million readers a day. He died on August 14, 1951.
Source: William Randolph Hearst
