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Jewish World Review June 15, 2000 / 12 Sivan, 5760
Chris Matthews
While it's always vain to claim personal premonitions, let
this be mine. For the past 13 years I have worked for
The San Francisco Examiner, the newspaper this great
Orson Welles film made famous.
It was at The Examiner that young William Randolph
Hearst began his swashbuckling, empire-building career
in newspapers. It was in the wild San Francisco of 1887
that this man, still in his early 20s, burned forever into
American myth what it means to publish a newspaper.
"My three ambitions, as you know," young "Will" Hearst
wrote his dad from Harvard, "are law, politics and
journalism and under favorable circumstances it might be
possible to combine all three."
While neither his stars nor his discipline gave him the right
trajectory for the first two career targets, the name Hearst
and the very notion of American newspapering quickly
became and remain in this third century of his empire
inseparable.
I write this column now because of a big, fast-paced new book by David
Nasaw. What strikes me reading the early chapters of "The Chief: The Life of
William Randolph Hearst" is how much zest and spirit the true story shares with
the Orson Welles triumph, which was so obviously based on it.
What strikes me looking back on my years at The Examiner, where Hearst
made his start an even 100 years before me, is how much real newspapering
feels, smells and looks like the world that boy-genius Welles rendered in the
movies.
"I don't get to bed until two o'clock and wake up at about seven in the morning
and can't get to sleep again," Hearst wrote his mother, "for I must see the paper
and compare it with the Chronicle."
That crazed seduction of deadline and newsprint is still alive today in The
Examiner newsroom. It's the professional lust pulling men and women toward
the next story, to getting it first, to writing it better.
I write this at a poignant time: Hearst hopes to sell the evening Examiner and
buy the morning Chronicle.
With luck and pluck, acquiring the Chronicle will do for The Examiner what the
great William Randolph Hearst did: expand its distribution reach, grow its
circulation, upgrade its operation — and enable it to brag about each new
advance on its front page. It will have the ambition to build and the moxie to
make the reader part of the action.
"To North! To South!" the May 23, 1887, Examiner screamed as it expanded
into the outer, younger counties of Northern California. "The bond is wielded
which knits together in unity and brotherhood the great metropolis of the West
and the country around it."
Now that's
06/12/00: Kennedy-Nixon redux?
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