Epicenter
A Hearst launches a new California publication.
Will Hearst wasn’t born in California, but the West Coast has long been his ideal.
“I can remember in high school having this strong feeling that I’m in the wrong place,” Hearst, 68, said recently from his 34th-floor office on Market Street in San Francisco, where the view takes in all of North Beach and, seemingly, the curve of the earth itself.
As a kid growing up in Manhattan, Hearst would visit his grandfather’s house — a 90,000-square-foot, 60-bathroom fixer-upper known as Hearst Castle in San Simeon
(San Luis Obispo County) — and find himself comforted. “I think it was the sense of open space, open possibilities,” he said.
In California, “the inside and outdoors were united with each other in a very seamless way.”
Hearst celebrated that openness in Outside, a magazine he was tapped to edit as a 28-yearold in 1977 by Rolling Stone founder Jann S. Wenner. “What I recall from editorial meetings was that he had more ideas than any human being I had ever met,” said Tim Cahill, a writer who worked on the launch of the magazine and continues to write for it today. “His mind worked incredibly fast.”
“Granted, some of the ideas were perfectly awful,” Cahill continued. “But every fifth or tenth one was brilliant.”
Outside was Hearst’s first job apart from apprenticing at his family’s company, a privately held concern that operates newspapers, magazines, Internet properties and cable networks nationwide, including The San Francisco Chronicle. Before that, he’d studied math at Harvard, where he studiously avoided both future journalist training grounds: the Harvard Crimson and the Harvard Lampoon. “I didn’t want to do things my grandfather had done,” he said.
“When you work at a family business there’s always this suspicion of how good are you?” Hearst recalled. A newsroom, he found, was a collegial environment. Reporters and editors were fun (“like circus people”) and advancement was meritocratic — even for a thirdgeneration scion of a newspaper fortune who shared his name with the one on the building.
“You could get yelled at for doing dumb things no matter who you were,” he said. “I felt like, ‘Yeah, this works for me.’ ”
Forty years later, Hearst is about to discover if it still works for him.
On Oct. 3, he launched the Journal of Alta California, an oversize generalinterest magazine dedicated to the state of California, as well as the California state of mind. With a print run of 21,000, the premiere issue features stories about celebrities-turnedbrands (think: Goop), immigration and Silicon Valley sexism, as well as cultural reviews, striking nature photography and stories drawn from history. Hearst serves as editor and publisher; Mark Potts is the managing editor.
Anchoring the magazine is a Q&A Hearst conducted with architect Frank Gehry, whose gray eminence gazes from the cover, prompting one to wonder (due respect to the Harvard Lampoon): Do Octogenarians Sell Magazines?
They might if the magazine
in question is aimed not at meme-obsessed Millennials but at adults who enjoy the New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. “I don’t think we have a 25-yearold reader,” Hearst said. “I think we have a 45- to 55-yearold reader who feels personally connected to the West.”
In other words, readers like Will Hearst — give or take 10 years.
“I’ve been thinking about it for more than a decade and talking to friends about it,” he said. “One of the things I found out is that if you have an idea and talk to your friend about it and everyone is tired of hearing about it after a while, it’s probably not that good an idea. But if people tell you you should do that, then it holds up a little better. That’s the experience I had.”
“It’s a good idea for California,” said Terry McDonell, who worked with Hearst at Outside and has edited nearly every magazine on the newsstand. Hearst “was very taken with the eccentric history of California for years,” McDonell said by
phone. “Will is eccentric and his tastes are eclectic. His take on California is unique.”
In person, Hearst has a playful, slightly ironic disposition with a mustache you might find on a friendly Good Humor man. In conversation, he’s more like an impish kid suppressing a joke than a father of four whose family owns a company valued in the multibillions.
“If you have a lighter touch, you can approach what’s really happening more easily than if you’re trying to be important and significant,” he said. “Being furrow-browed about things, you run the risk of being heavy and partisan. I’d rather be a little bit detached and quick-witted.”
That detachment softens the carved-ingranite name (its numerals serving as Doric columns) and erases any intimidation one might feel sitting across from him with that empyrean view spread behind him.
Hearst’s wit is evident in a series of 1980s San Francisco Examiner commercials he starred in, when Hearst Corp. still operated the paper and he served as publisher. In one, he speaks to his grandfather’s portrait (shades of Nixon?) about hiring Hunter S. Thompson as a columnist. In another from 1990 (set in “San Francisco, 2010, A.D.”), he critiques a reporter’s work as lacking
heart, only to discover he’s hired an android.
That humor finds its way into Alta in the form of winking headlines that call back to California history: A story on Silicon Valley gender inequality is headlined “The Boys on the Tech Bus” (a nod to “The Boys on the Bus,” Rolling Stone writer Timothy Crouse’s dispatch from the 1972 campaign trail); an exposé of Gwyneth Paltrow and Jessica Alba’s shill work gets “I’m With the Brand,” calling to mind Pamela Des Barres’ famous rock groupie memoir, “I’m With the Band.”
Alta’s most fully formed joke, though, can be found on its back cover: A full-bleed illustration that turns Saul Steinberg’s View of the World From 9th Avenue on its head. Steinberg’s drawing, a self-mockingly parochial view of the world through the eyes of a New Yorker, is redrawn by John Mavroudis and shows the world through a Californian’s eyes. Up front, the Transamerica Pyramid and the iconic oversize doughnut sign from Randy’s Donuts in Los Angeles, with New York, Washington, D.C., and the rest of the world reduced to specks in the distance.
As magazine editorial statements go, it’s pretty strong. It’s also pretty funny. And as a view, it may not be quite as good as Hearst’s own, but it’s not too shabby.
“I don’t think we have a 25-year-old reader. I think we have a 45- to 55-year-old reader who feels personally connected to the West.” William R. Hearst III