It’s one of the grandest names in newspaper history, but it’s one seldom heard in the industry conversation about the future of the American press.
As The New York Times and The Washington Post have come to dominate national newspapering, we hear mostly about two kinds of regional companies. There are the three big guys — Gannett, GateHouse Media, and Digital First Media — all consolidators of one kind or another, who now collectively own a quarter of U.S. dailies. Then there are the privately owned independents — The Boston Globe, the Star Tribune, The Dallas Morning News, The Seattle Times — caught mid-innovation, fashioning new business models on the fly that they intend will somehow allow them to fulfill their civic missions. Then there’s Tronc, McClatchy, and Lee, all chains on the edge, their status as publicly traded companies complicating their digital transformations.
And there’s Hearst. Founded by William Randolph Hearst in 1887, Hearst is slowly re-emerging anew as a newspaper company. Now owning 22 dailies — from New Haven to Albany to Houston to San Francisco — and 64 weeklies, Hearst now says it’s in acquisition mode. Just a month ago, it became the biggest publisher in Connecticut, buying the New Haven Register, some related smaller titles, and Connecticut Magazine from Digital First Media. That followed three other acquisitions in the past year, the biggest a deal that added 24 weeklies situated around its highly profitable Houston Chronicle. That buy reinforced Hearst’s overall strength in Texas, where it owns six dailies, including the San Antonio Express-News.
Mark Aldam, the Hearst Newspaper Group president, is the architect of that growth, and of a wider strategy that may make Hearst a more important company in those industry conversations.
“You can also expect us to look outside of the markets where we presently have businesses when the right assets are available at a reasonable multiple,” he told me recently.
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