George Hearst

In 1880, California gold-rush millionaire and future U.S senator George Hearst acquired the San Francisco Examiner newspaper from a friend, as partial payment of a poker debt. Seven years later Hearst gave the paper to his 23-year-old son William, who expressed an interest in the newspaper business and who had just been expelled from Harvard.

William understood what would make newspapers sell. He hired the best talent available (including Mark Twain, Jack London, and Ambrose Bierce) and he set out to make his papers irresistible reading, even among the working class, with attention-grabbing headlines and front-page stories focused on sensational crimes and lurid scandals—imitating the style of Joseph Pulitzer, the newspaper man Hearst most admired.

Within a few years Hearst had dramatically increased the circulation of the Examiner, and he was ready for a bigger challenge. In 1895 he purchased the New York Morning Journal, to take on Pulitzer, his idol and now rival, head-to-head, igniting a war of newspapers that would take journalism deeper into the gutters.

Hearst cut the price of his paper to a penny (forcing Pulitzer to do the same), and he raided Pulitzer’s papers for the top talent. As they battled it out for supremacy, both men kept their papers filled with sensationalized and exaggerated stories about crimes and scandals, epitomizing what came to be called “yellow journalism.” Within two years Hearst had surpassed Pulitzer and was publishing two dailies in New York with a combined daily circulation of over 1.5 million. By the 1920’s Hearst owned 20 daily newspapers in 13 cities, a film company, and six magazines (including Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, and Harper's Bazaar)—a media empire that had made him fabulously wealthy.

In 1903, at age 40, Hearst married a 21-year-old New York showgirl whose mother ran a brothel and had powerful connections in the New York underworld. Although, like their father, none of their five sons graduated college, all went on to successful careers in the media business.

Although badly damaged by the Great Depression, the Hearst empire survived and began to prosper again as the economy recovered.

In 1941 an ambitious young director named Orson Welles produced a film based on Hearst’s life, infuriating Hearst. After failing in his efforts to prevent the film’s release, Hearst offered to pay Welles to nix it and destroy the prints. Welles refused and Citizen Kane is now regarded as one of the greatest achievements in cinematography.

In the years following World War II Hearst’s enterprises boomed and in his final years he devoted much of his time to philanthropy. He died in Beverly Hills in August 1951, at age 88.

William Randolph Hearst was born in San Francisco on April 29, 1863.