overview
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Hearst
Founded by William Randolph Hearst (supposedly the inspiration for
a 1941 love letter from Orson Welles titled Citizen Kane) Hearst Corporation
is a major New York based publishing conglomerate, still controlled by
the Hearst family.
Current operations include newspaper, magazine, book, and business publishing; television and radio
broadcasting; cable network programming; newspaper features
distribution; television production and distribution; and new media.
Hearst is the world's largest publisher of monthly magazines, with 16 US
titles and 98 international editions distributed in more than 100
countries. It publishes 12 daily and 18 weekly newspapers. Hearst's television holdings
reach around 17.5% of US households (26 stations
in Boston, Pittsburgh, Sacramento, Orlando, Honolulu and other
locations); it has extensive cable television interests.
In July 2000 Hearst bought the San
Francisco Chronicle (for US$660 million), after disposing of the
ailing Examiner, W R Hearst's first newspaper
the man
David Nasaw's recent The Chief: The
Life of William Randolph Hearst (Boston, Houghton Mifflin 00) has
overshadowed the more detailed and more probing, although less graceful, William
Randolph Hearst: The Early Years 1863-1910 (New York, Oxford Uni
Press) by Ben Procter. We enjoyed William Swanberg's jaunty Citizen
Hearst (New York, Galahad 96) and the indignant Imperial Hearst:
A Social Biography (Westport, Greenwood Press 70) by Ferdinand Lundberg, first
published in 1936.
Among postgrad fodder the major works are Jim Tuck's McCarthyism
& New York's Hearst Press: A Study of Roles in the Witch Hunt
(New York, Uni Press of America 95) and The View From Xanadu: William
Randolph Hearst & US Foreign Policy (Toronto, McGill-Queens Uni
Press 95) by Ian Mugridge and Judith Robinson's The Hearsts: An
American Dynasty (Lanham, Uni of Delaware Press 91). John Tebbel's The
Life & Good Times of William Randolph Hearst (New York, Dutton
53) is of interest for the author's subsequent fame as an historian of
US publishing.
Marion Davies, Hearst's companion,
wrote The Times We Had: Life With William Randolph Hearst (New
York, Ballantine 89). It's not particularly enlightening but essential
reading if you've been bitten by the Kane bug, although we think Kane
is just as much about the very clever Mr Welles as it is about Hearst.
The
Citizen Kane Book (Boston, Little Brown 71) is a minor classic with
the Welles-Mankiewicz script and Pauline Kael's 'Raising Kane' essay.
For Welles we recommend Barbara Leaming's Orson Welles: A Biography
(New York, Viking 85).
In reality, after William's death all
the kings horses and all the kings men put the empire back together
again. Some sense of the reconstruction is given by Lindsey Chaney's The
Hearsts: Family & Empire - The Later Years (New York, Simon
& Schuster 81). William Randolph Hearst Jr, with assistance from
Jack Casserly, wrote The Hearsts: Father & Son (Niwot,
Roberts Rinehart 91) ... reminiscent of Thomas Watson Jr's Father,
Son & Co.
Other perspectives are provided by
Nicholas Coleridge's chatty Paper Tigers (London, Heinemann 93)
and Piers Brendon's account in The Life & Death of the Press
Barons (London, Secker & Warburg 82) of turn of the century
publishing ogres.
holdings
The
following page provides an inventory of Hearst
holdings.
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