44. Hurst: the new peak of sensational journalism

The founder of another “newspaper empire”, William Hearst, was the direct opposite of Pulitzer. This offspring of the richest family in California was educated at Harvard. He did not show diligence in his studies, the university never finished, but he became interested in journalism. To please his son, his father presented him with the San Francisco Eczeminer newspaper, which he had previously received for being and that was the first link in the newspaper chain of the future king of the yellow press. He was then 24 years old. With the money of his father, he hired the best employees and put the case in a big way. Soon the circulation of the newspaper reached 80 thousand copies.

With a virtually unlimited source of funding in the face of his parents, Hurst did not need to save money, like Pulitzer. He immediately invested 7.5 million of his father's money in the New York newspaper Morning Tzhornel acquired by him. Hurst paid unprecedentedly high salaries, and he managed to lure away the best employees of Pulitzer. In vain, Pulitzer called Hurst "a dude who soon squandered his parents' money" and even gave him a period of 6 months for this. Six months passed, and the concern of Hirst continued to increase momentum.

In search of a reader approach, Hurst did not seek to invent something fundamentally new, but followed the same path as Pulitzer, leaning on violence, melodrama and sex, but did it "more efficiently because he invested a lot of money.

Hearst newspapers paid much less attention to public jinzi and were much more conservative than Pulitzer newspapers. On foreign policy issues, Hirst's position came close to that of the Republicans: support for the war with Spain and isolationism during the First World War almost until the United States joined it.

"Newspaper Chain" Hirst replenished with new links. In 1933 she entered the period of her highest power. By that time, it included 26 daily and 17 weekly newspapers, 13 magazines and 2 film companies. Central to the “newspaper empire” of Hirst were such influential daily newspapers as the Morning Dozhrnel, mentioned above, and the Chicago American, created in 1900. However, in subsequent years, Hearst began to take the position of new newspaper trusts. William Hearst died in 1955, leaving to his heirs a publishing house that was still among the top ten in the United States and controlled 10% of the daily print run of the American press.