Quote of the Day (William Randolph Hearst, on His “Little Paper”)

“I have begun to have a strange fondness for our little paper (the San Francisco Examiner] -a tenderness like unto that which a mother feels for a puny or deformed offspring, and I should hate to see it die now after it had battled so long and so nobly for existence; in fact, to tell the truth, I am possessed of the weakness, which at some time or other of their lives, pervades most men; I am convinced that I could run a newspaper successfully.”—William Randolph Hearst to his father, California Senator George Hearst, 1885, quoted in A Treasury of the World's Great Letters: From Ancient Days to Our Own Time, edited by M. Lincoln Schuster (1940)

(In a time of declining circulation and increased staff layoffs for newspapers—indeed, for “old media” in general—the letter from which I’ve just quoted fills one with nostalgia for the days when print not only mattered but flourished. Oddly enough, the person nowadays who comes closest to Hearst’s passion for newspapers is his contemporary counterpart in yellow journalism, Rupert Murdoch.

Reading this passage reminds one of brash Charles Foster Kane in Orson Welles’ scandalous cinematic takedown of Hearst, Citizen Kane, except that the real-life events behind this letter are probably even more extraordinary. Hearst’s father, a geologist who had lucked into a goldmine that had made him a multimillionaire, harbored, as his son would after him, political ambitions. To that end, he had bought the struggling San Francisco Examiner as a mouthpiece for his opinions. Nevertheless, he didn’t see much future in the money-losing rag.

William begged to differ. You can see here traces of the scamp who’d been expelled from Harvard for such pranks as sending engraved silver chamber pots—you know, in those days, the kind of receptacles used for relieving one’s self—to professors. But, as the letter goes on, you can also see a keen intelligence that knew how to market to a new age (a change in layout, he observed, could produce “a much cleaner and neater appearance”) and what types of people would be best to staff the paper (“active, intelligent and energetic young men”—not unlike himself, one suspects).