Word: hearsts
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...where are Halberstam and Wolfe and Talese when we need them? Probably deterred by the work it would take to pry the secrets out of the Hearst fortress, perched pretentiously on a mountain over the Pacific just south of San Francisco, and probably too offended by the vulgarity of the story. Instead we have a new book by two California writers, Chaney and Cieply, a mere outline for the possible investigative epic of family and corporation. One almost always feels as if the door to the closet with all the skeletons were only opened a few inches...
Only a few of the magnetic figures of the Hearst saga ever come to life: Randolph; who was spurred into trying to improve the San Francisco Examiner when critics convinced him of its awfulness and who then faded away amid the flames and communiques of the Patty kidnapping; Bill, trying time after time to grab hold of a paper or to understand how his father had betrayed him; young Will, trying to break out of the circle by joining Jann Wenner in a new magazine called Outside, and discovering Wenner as disappointing a publisher as assorted Hearsts had been. Despite...
Even so, it is a careful book, sustained by a measured and sympathetic tone and full of important new information about a well-guarded subject. Oddly, left without the intrigue, the incestuous passions and jealousies, one may find the business documentation fascinating. The book reveals that the privately-held Hearst Corporation is doing very well, laying to rest rumours of its failure in many cities. The book also demonstrates that the corporation prefers its more respectable and more rewarding magazines to the newspapers; it would rather let the latter drift towards dissolution, sale, or merger, than try to figure...
...READILY REMEMBERED that the patriarch Hearst did have a formula, not a bad one at that, and Chaney and Cieply do a fine service in tracing that idea through its subsequent incarnations and devolutions. Hearst started urban dailies at a time of populist politics, and he thrived on these crusades...
...papers never grew up. When readership moved to the suburbs and became more respectable, the Hearst papers couldn't follow. The domineering Hearst had made his sons unfit to lead by spoiling them, pulling them out of college, putting them in jobs over their heads, dashing their confidence, and sealing the insult in his will by contriving to strip them of command and money. So the company fell into the hands of a riskless, unimaginative class of managers who kept the family at bay, sold off half the papers from 1956-67, and turned a turbulent enterprise into a bottom...