William Randolph Hearst was born on April 29th 1863 in San Francisco and was an only child. His father, George Hearst, was one of the tens of thousands of men lured to California by the promise of gold. This was known as the ‘Gold Rush’, which took place through the 1840s and 1850s. Mass immigration occurred after around 55,000 people travelled to the Californian gold fields. Due to the masses, one in ten people died in the drive west across the continent. People became inventive and violent and acquired the viewpoint that the further west you went the more American you were.
America had two types of newspapers to begin with, both known as the Penny Papers but one was political and one commercial. Political parties financed the political papers. George Hearst won The Examiner in a poker game, and he used this as his cheerleader for his campaign.
In 1846 the New York newspapers organised The Associated Press, which aimed to be objective due to it supplying content for a variety of papers with widely different political allegiance.
In 1887 William Randolph Hearst took over The Examiner and transformed it by reducing the stories, doubling the size of the headlines and eliminating the advertisements. Also, above the masthead, he put endorsements and circulation figures. Illustrations were then introduced because, “they attract the eye and stimulate the imagination of the lower classes and materially aid comprehension”. Hearst improved the writing within The Examiner by making it far more focussed and urgent. E.g. “Butchered As They Ran.”
In 1896 Hearst poached the Yellow Kid from Pulitzer, who inspired him, and for a time two newspapers both had the Yellow Kid and were described as the ‘Yellow Papers’ (This is where the term Yellow Journalism comes from), which is today’s equivalent to the ‘Red Tops’.
The Journal and The World even battled to solve crimes. They would offer rewards for anyone with any evidence towards a current unsolved crime in order to solve and publish the story first.
William Randolph Hearst is ultimately famous for the Spanish War. In 1897, as the insurrection continued to build in Cuba, Hearst sent one of his best reporters and illustrators to the island. The reporter complained in a letter that he had not heard a shot fired or seen in insurgent. The illustrator who had also been sent to Cuba had said, “Everything is quiet and there will be no war”. Hearst replied, “Please remain, you furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war”.
Hearst created the models for modern, popular/tabloid journalism, which is the style that is used amongst UK newspapers today such as the Daily Mail, Daily Mirror and The Sun.
