Hearstian Revival

In the late 1880s, Publishing Dynamo William Randolph Hearst's San Francisco Examiner helped to introduce sensationalism, jingoism and human interest into newspaper reporting. But in recent years the once garish Examiner, fading visibly, has resembled nothing so much as a hazy fog rolling in from the Pacific--with the news reporting turning blurred, local color getting soupy and editorials going bland.

That may be changing. Since September 1972, a 25-year-old Hearst grandson and the family's current power broker at the Examiner, "Willie" III, has revived some of the old spirit and innovative kick of grandpa. He has successfully pushed the nondescript Examiner into making its most striking changes in decades, including a new six-column page format (which may make its debut this month), a reduced page size to save money, more minority reporters, and expanded investigative and news coverage.

Any change at the Examiner is shocking to most San Franciscans, since "no change" served as a standard for a generation. Indeed, inertia has been the rule for both of the city's dailies, the Chronicle and the Examiner, since they joined forces in 1964 to cut costs by establishing a joint company, Printco, which handles printing, distribution and advertising for the two newspapers and puts out a combined Sunday edition, the Examiner & Chronicle.

Under the arrangement, the papers have kept their editorial independence, but the Examiner switched from morning to afternoon publication. Since the two dailies split Printco profits and losses fifty-fifty, the financially wan Examiner was able to improve its enfeebled condition, even though circulation dropped from 240,000 to its present 165,000 with the switch from a.m. to p.m.

The accord left the city with a pair of smug, noncompetitive, conservative newspapers. Not until the gradual involvement of Randolph Hearst, father of kidnaped Patty Hearst and the Examiner's president since 1973, did the old family flagship begin to change. Stirred by a tour of the barrios of several cities, including San Francisco, in 1969, and pressured by his daughter Patty and nephew Willie, who told him that the Bay Area's young ignored the Examiner, Randolph Hearst appointed men in their 30s to the city-editor and news-editor slots, put some life into the paper's seven-year-old minority-hiring program, and paid more attention to rock, theater and minority events. Finally, he made himself editor and, last month, publisher. As he admits now: "I don't think we or any other people had really been covering the needs of the majority of the people in San Francisco."

Mighty Chain. The greatest pressure for change has come from Willie. Physically akin to his grandfather, with piercing eyes, patrician nose and blond hair, young Hearst says that he has always been fascinated by the once mighty chain of 32 dailies. "As a kid I would go to San Simeon [the vast Hearst estate] and groove on the whole vision. I really admired my grandfather. What a mover! I decided you had to have money to do these things, and I realized the money came from the papers."

Willie, who studied at Harvard, where he got an A.B. in mathematics, did more than a year's apprenticeship at the Examiner. Then, at Randolph's urging, he was soon busy installing his friends on the paper, including Bob Hayes as black minority adviser and sportswriter; Raul Ramirez, a 28-year-old Cuban journalist from the Washington Post, as an investigative reporter; and Reporter Larry Kramer, an abrasive 24-year-old Harvard M.B.A. (who in 1974 wrote his master's thesis on the Hearst Corp.), as assistant to the executive editor, to churn out ideas.

Young Hearst, working as a sort of Minister Without Portfolio, quickly left his imprint all over the Examiner. He helped set up a lively "Op-Ed" page, "Other Voices." He pushed expansion of the paper to six sections (from its normal four) for at least 60 days a year, thereby beefing up the Examiner's scrawny consumer reporting. And, backed by his uncle, he went in for investigations; one series actually questioned the rate increases asked by the Pacific Gas & Electric Co., formerly an Examiner untouchable.

Sticky financing problems remain, however. The Examiner made a slim profit off Printco's gross of $100 million in 1974, but it must pay for new computerized editing and composing systems in the next three years. The money may be hard to come by. Ad lines are down from last year. Circulation, which was 179,010 in 1973, has slipped substantially in the past 13 months.

Still, Willie Hearst's determination to improve the paper has not flagged. Says he: "I don't mean making us into the most powerful paper." What he wants is to convince San Franciscans that "when you read something in the Examiner, you'll know it is first, true, well researched; and second, that it is well written."

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