Editing Hearst Communications (section)

=== Retrenching after the Great Depression ===
The [[Great Depression]] hurt Hearst and his publications. Cosmopolitan Book was sold to [[Farrar & Rinehart]] in 1931.<ref name="cosmobook" /> After two years of leasing them to Eleanor "Cissy" Patterson (of the McCormick-Patterson family that owned the ''[[Chicago Tribune]]''), Hearst sold her ''The Washington Times'' and ''Herald'' in 1939; she merged them to form the ''[[Washington Times-Herald]]''. That year he also bought the ''[[The Milwaukee Sentinel|Milwaukee Sentinel]]'' from Paul Block (who bought it from the Pfisters in 1929), absorbing his afternoon ''Wisconsin News'' into the morning publication. Also in 1939, he sold the ''Atlanta Georgian'' to Cox Newspapers, which merged it with the ''[[Atlanta Journal]]''.

Following [[Adolf Hitler's rise to power]] in Germany, the Nazis received positive press coverage by Hearst presses and paid ten times the standard subscription rate for the INS wire service belonging to Hearst.<ref name=":1">{{Cite book |last=Parenti |first=Michael |title=Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism |publisher=City Lights Books |year=1997 |isbn=978-0-87286-329-3 |location=[[San Francisco]] |pages=11 |language=en}}</ref> William Randolph Hearst personally instructed his reporters in Germany to only give positive coverage to Hitler and the Nazis, and fired journalists who refused to write stories favourable of German fascism.<ref name=":1" /> During this time, high ranking Nazis were given space to write articles in Hearst press newspapers, including [[Hermann Göring]] and [[Alfred Rosenberg]].<ref name=":1" />

Hearst, with his chain now owned by his creditors after a 1937 liquidation,<ref>{{Cite journal|url=https://www.thenation.com/article/devil-and-mr-hearst/|title=The Devil and Mr. Hearst|last=Frank|first=Dana|date=June 22, 2000|journal=The Nation|access-date=March 19, 2019|archive-date=October 22, 2019|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20191022075522/https://www.thenation.com/article/devil-and-mr-hearst/|url-status=dead}}</ref> also had to merge some of his morning papers into his afternoon papers. In Chicago, he combined the morning ''Herald-Examiner'' and the afternoon ''American'' into the ''Herald-American'' in 1939. This followed the 1937 combination of the New York ''Evening Journal'' and the morning ''American'' into the ''[[New York Journal-American]]'', the sale of the ''[[Omaha Daily Bee]]'' to the ''[[World-Herald]]''.

Afternoon papers were a profitable business in pre-television days, often outselling their morning counterparts featuring stock market information in early editions, while later editions were heavy on sporting news with results of baseball games and horse races. Afternoon papers also benefited from continuous reports from the battlefront during [[World War II]]. After the war, however, both television news and suburbs experienced explosive growth; thus, evening papers were more affected than those published in the morning, whose circulation remained stable while their afternoon counterparts' sales plummeted.

In 1947, Hearst produced an early television newscast for the [[DuMont Television Network]]: ''[[I.N.S. Telenews]]'', and in 1948 he became the owner of one of the first television stations in the country, [[WBAL-TV]] in [[Baltimore]].

The earnings of Hearst's three morning papers, the ''[[San Francisco Examiner]]'', the ''[[Los Angeles Examiner]]'', and ''The Milwaukee Sentinel'', supported the company's money-losing afternoon publications such as the ''Los Angeles Herald-Express'', the ''[[New York Journal-American]]'', and the ''[[Chicago American]]''. The company sold the latter paper in 1956 to the ''[[Chicago Tribune]]''{{'}}s o wners, who changed it to the tabloid-size ''Chicago Today'' in 1969 and ceased publication in 1974. In 1960, Hearst also sold the ''[[Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph]]'' to the ''[[Pittsburgh Post-Gazette]]'' and the ''Detroit Times'' to ''[[The Detroit News]]''. After a lengthy strike it sold the ''Milwaukee Sentinel'' to the afternoon ''[[Milwaukee Journal]]'' in 1962. The same year Hearst's Los Angeles papers – the morning ''Examiner'' and the afternoon ''Herald-Express'' – merged to become the evening ''[[Los Angeles Herald-Examiner]]''. The [[1962–63 New York City newspaper strike]] left the city with no papers for over three months, with the ''Journal-American'' one of the earliest strike targets of the Typographical Union. The ''Boston Record'' and the ''Evening American'' merged in 1961 as the ''Record-American'' and in 1964, the ''Baltimore News-Post'' became the ''Baltimore News-American''.

In 1953, Hearst Magazines bought ''[[Sports Afield]]'' magazine, which it published until 1999 when it sold the journal to [[Robert E. Petersen]]. In 1958, Hearst's International News Service merged with E.W. Scripps' [[United Press]], forming [[United Press International]] as a response to the growth of the [[Associated Press]] and [[Reuters]]. The following year Scripps-Howard's ''San Francisco News'' merged with Hearst's afternoon ''San Francisco Call-Bulletin''. Also in 1959, Hearst acquired the paperback book publisher [[Avon (publisher)|Avon Books]].<ref>{{Cite magazine|url=http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,864911,00.html|title=The Press: Quiet Deal|date=August 31, 1959|magazine=Time|access-date=April 23, 2019|language=en-US|issn=0040-781X}}</ref>

In 1965, the Hearst Corporation began pursuing [[joint operating agreement]]s (JOAs). It reached the first agreement with the DeYoung family, proprietors of the afternoon ''[[San Francisco Chronicle]]'', which began to produce a joint Sunday edition with the ''Examiner''. In turn, the ''Examiner'' became an evening publication, absorbing the ''[[The San Francisco Call|News-Call-Bulletin]]''. The following year, the ''Journal-American'' reached another JOA with another two landmark New York City papers: the ''[[New York Herald Tribune]]'' and [[Scripps-Howard]]'s ''[[New York World-Telegram|World-Telegram and Sun]]'' to form the ''New York World Journal Tribune'' (recalling the names of the city's mid-market dailies), which collapsed after only a few months.

The 1962 merger of the ''Herald-Express'' and ''Examiner'' in Los Angeles led to the termination of many journalists who began to stage a 10-year strike in 1967. The effects of the strike accelerated the pace of the company's demise, with the ''Herald Examiner'' ceasing publication November 2, 1989.<ref>{{cite web| title=The Last Los Angeles Herald-Examiner Strike| url=https://library.csun.edu/SCA/Peek-in-the-Stacks/Examiner| date=February 3, 2014| website=[[California State University Northridge]] [[Oviatt Library]]| access-date=August 28, 2018}}</ref>