Hearst showed ingeniousness in making Examiner a success
On March 4, 1887, a new name appeared atop the masthead of the San Francisco Daily Examiner: “W.R. Hearst, proprietor.”
Few people noticed. With a circulation of 15,000, the Examiner was the weakest of the city’s three main newspapers, trailing both The San Francisco Chronicle (circulation 37,500) and the San Francisco Call, which claimed to have twice the circulation of The Chronicle. The only Democratic paper in the city, the Examiner had been losing money for years. In 1880, a rough-edged, semi-literate mining magnate named George Hearst bought it to support his bid for the U.S. Senate. Hearst was elected senator in 1887, but the Examiner remained on life support. Now preoccupied with politics, George Hearst decided to give his son and only child, William Randolph Hearst, a shot at publishing the moribund daily.
The choice seemed dubious at best. At age 24, Will Hearst had given no indication that he was anything other than the spoiled son of rich, indulgent parents. His life had been char
acterized mainly by juvenile pranks, a complete lack of interest in studying, a disdain for propriety in his romantic life, and a profligate use of his father’s wealth. The year before, he had been expelled from Harvard.
But this unimpressive youth turned out to be a born newspaperman.
Hearst had paid little attention to his classes at Harvard, but there was one subject he did study intensely: the newspaper industry. The paper that he paid most attention to was Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World.
Pulitzer had revolutionized the newspaper business, and become very rich, by tapping into what ordinary New Yorkers, including its vast numbers of working-class immigrants, wanted to read. The World’s formula — state-of-the-art presses, high-paid editors and reporters, and punchy and sensational stories, with a heavy emphasis on crime, exposés, stunts by star reporters such as Nelly Bly, sports and comics — proved wildly successful.
Hearst believed the same formula, abetted by George Hearst’s vast fortune, would work in San Francisco.
“One year from the day I take hold of the thing our circulation will have increased ten thousand,” he wrote to his father. “We must be alarmingly enterprising, and we must be startlingly original.”
Displaying energy and initiative that few would have expected from him, young Hearst moved decisively to put the Examiner on the city’s map. His first move was to get the exclusive San Francisco rights to publish cabled articles from the respected New York Herald. The Journalist, the leading trade journal, wrote that this “masterstroke of enterprise … falls like a bombshell on the other morning papers.” The cables augmented the Examiner’s national and international coverage so greatly that it instantly expanded from six to 10 pages. The Call was unable to afford to follow suit, but The Chronicle did. A ferocious newspaper war was on.
As editor and publisher, Hearst threw himself into that fight with a vengeance. He upgraded the Examiner’s old presses, cleaned up its layout and expanded its reach, delivering papers to Sacramento and San Jose.
He also began paying top dollar to writers. Hearst went to call on Ambrose “Bitter” Bierce, notorious for his vicious wit, to offer him a position. Bierce recalled that he had no idea who the diffident young man was who had appeared unannounced at his door, and simply said, “Well?” “I am from the San Francisco Examiner,’ he explained in a voice like the fragrance of violets made audible, and backed away a little.
“‘O,’ I said, ‘you come from Mr. Hearst.’ ”
“Then that unearthly child lifted its blue eyes and cooed; ‘I am Mr. Hearst.’ ”
Following Pulitzer’s example, Hearst also went all in on “stunt” journalism. An Examiner reporter hurled himself from a ferry into the bay to expose the unpreparedness of the crew. Another got drunk and was checked into the House of Inebriates for two weeks, writing a story revealing that the sobering-up facility was misused as a private jail.
The master of this sensational genre was a young reporter named Winifred Black, who, under the pseudonym Annie Laurie, wrote a series of celebrated exposés, including one in which she went undercover to reveal her shoddy treatment by the city’s emergency hospital services.
Known as a “sob sister” for her ability to make her readers weep, Black remembered the Examiner newsroom as “a place full of geniuses. … Nowhere was there ever a more brilliant and more outrageous, incredible, ridiculous, glorious set of typical newspaper people than there was in that shabby old newspaper office.”
Hearst’s remaking of the Examiner cost his father a fortune, but the investment paid off. By 1890, the Examiner’s circulation had tripled and it claimed to be profitable.
But Hearst, ever restless, had become bored with San Francisco. He had his eyes on the publishing world’s big prize: New York.
In 1895, Hearst purchased a feeble newspaper called the New York Morning Journal. Everyone expected the young upstart from the West to fail. Instead, he created the most powerful media empire in U.S. history — which includes The Chronicle — one that started with a failing newspaper in San Francisco.