Tiscali Quicklinks. Please visit our Accessibility Page for a list of the Access Keys you can use to find your way around the site, skip directly to the main navigation, to the page content, or to more links within reference.
Born in San Francisco, California, the son of George Hearst, a US senator and gold-mine owner, Hearst took over the San Francisco Examiner from his father in 1887. Within ten years its circulation had quadrupled to nearly 100,000. Hearst, who had modelled the newspaper on the journalistic techniques of Joseph Pulitzer, then moved further into the USA's newspaper market; he acquired the New York Morning Journal in 1895 and launched the Evening Journal in 1896. Hearst began a fierce circulation war with Pulitzer, using a blend of investigative (into monopolies and corruption), sensational (articles about crime), and jingoistic reporting.