An interview with Maclean’s editor-in-chief Ken Whyte about his new book on William Hearst

Of all the non-fiction titles I’ve read this year, few have surprised and delighted me more than Maclean’s editor-in-chief and publisher Ken Whyte’s new account of the rise of William Randolph Hearst, The Uncrowned King. While the book focuses on the struggle for marketplace dominance between Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, it is, at heart, a history of America at the dawn of the twentieth century, densely packed with research, anecdote, and analysis. (It also offers a fantastic epigraph, worth repeating, from the inimitable Randall Jarrell: “The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.”)

I spoke with Whyte last week, amidst a grim season for the print media in general, but before this week’s even grimmer news of the bankruptcy of the Tribune group and the New York Times’ new mortgage. As Whyte explains below, his critical reconsideration of Hearst’s early New York success has convinced him that a serious reimagining of what newspapers do is necessary should they hope to survive in the twenty-first century.

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You note that you first read about Hearst while preparing for the launch of the National Post, but that you didn’t see enough there to convince you that the stereotypes about him were inaccurate. What about your experience in newspapers made want to return to study him five years later?

When I returned to it, I still hadn’t changed my mind about Hearst. I’d always had suspicions that something wasn’t right in the way the story was told, because I didn’t believe that Hearst could go from such a low circulation to a high circulation in such a competitive market unless there was something interesting, compelling about his newspaper. So I suspected that people who had written about this episode were missing some of the qualities or appeal of it, otherwise he couldn’t have had that kind of success. When I started working on the book again after I left the Post, I had intended to write about the newspaper war between Hearst and Pulitzer. It wasn’t really going to be a book about Hearst—it was going to be a book about this competition between them and their papers in this crucial period when what emerges is the full-blown, mass market newspapers we’re accustomed to today. And it was only as I started getting deeper into the research of that project that various things about Hearst became evident and he began to take over the story. I did come away from the Post with a better appreciation of the dynamics of newspaper competition that I had going in, which is that you can’t really believe anything a newspaper says about another newspaper in a competitive environment.

And why did you feel this book needed to be written? Throughout, you mention the conflicting reports and flaws in the leading biographies, but is there an overarching motivation that drove you to what must have been an incredibly labor intensive project?

I think there’s a style of journalism there that deserves reconsideration. We’re in a mass-market industry in newspapers, and in most magazines, and we have properties that are circulated to enormous audiences. We have large readerships, and we want large readerships, and we tell our advertisers that we want large readerships, but I don’t think we do a lot to really attract and hold those readerships. There’s a sense, I think, in the industry that whenever you try to produce a product that is appealing to readers, or that captures the sensibilities of your readers, or that touches your readers emotions that you’re pandering, that you’re a demagogue, and that it’s somehow illegitimate journalistic practice to do it. And I think one of the reasons we think that way is that we look back to when newspapers were really in touch with their readers, and were dependent on the loyalty of their readers for their financial health, which hasn’t been the case for a century. But back at the last moment when they were, which is this period I’m writing about, we dismiss it all as yellow journalism and sensationalism and think that nothing but that came from it. So we dismiss that approach entirely, but I think there’s a lot to be learned from it. It was important to me, as an editor, to sort that out.

Along those lines, you note, “The degree to which editors sought to speak ‘the sentiment of the people,” rather than study or direct it, is a crucial difference between nineteenth- and twentieth-century journalism.”

Not only not study or direct it, but hold your nose at it, hold it at arms length. I think we’re distant from our readers.

If that’s a crucial difference between the periods, what are some others?

We don’t innovate anymore, for readers. If you look at newspapers as they are now, there’s almost nothing that we’ve added in the last hundred years for the benefit of readers. Everything we like about newspapers now—from front page illustrations, photojournalism, headline styles, op-ed pages, feature columnists, sports pages, lifestyle pages, funny pages, even games and horoscopes—all of that stuff was there, or came to be and was enhanced during this period when Hearst and Pulitzer were at war. And there’s been nothing added since, despite a hundred years of opportunity and, really, monstrous profits by newspaper companies. All of the additions to newspapers since that time have been, I think, aimed at pleasing advertisers instead of pleasing readers. It’s been the accumulation of ad environments, whether they’re travel sections, home sections, car sections, whatever. And I’m all for advertising—I think it’s a great thing for publications; I had been working at any point during the twentieth century I would have chased the advertising as well, it’d be stupid not to. But I think the reason you have advertisers is because they want to trade on your relationship as an editor with your readers. And we were so busy with the advertising part of our business that we have neglected our readers.

I was thinking about that when I was reading the book. I kind of said to myself, ‘My god! Everything’s the same as it is now.’ And then I had this aha! moment where I realized they didn’t have comics. But of course halfway through the book the Yellow Kid arrives, and it was like, ‘of course!’

Not only did they have comics, but the comics were funny! They were also relevant. They took on everything that was happening at the moment. The thing about the Yellow Kid is that I saw him as this quaint little street urchin—I had an impression of him as being a faintly silly and musty sort of thing. I was really surprised when I started looking at how much social commentary was in those comics. There was a lot of class commentary, political commentary, social commentary. They were really relevant in the same way that Stephen Colbert, or Jon Stewart, or Saturday Night Live were relevant in this last election. Newspapers used to play that role. And newspaper cartoonists and comics used to play that role. And they don’t anymore—it’s been twenty years, more than that. I think Doonsebury on Reagan’s reign in the eighties was the last moment when a newspaper cartoonist really captured public attention.

Back to Pulitzer, is it fair to believe that Hearst could never have achieved what he did with the Journal if not for the trailblazing of Pulitzer? I recall you noting Pulitzer’s instructions to his new staff at the World—that instead of taking baths every day they’re walking down the bowery—and it seems to me that Hearst’s Journal took Pulitzer’s model and did it better.

I was trying to get across the point that it’s all really a continuum starting with the penny press in the 1830s, and this notion that you could sell newspapers to the man on the street if you understood what his priorities were and what his sensibility was. It just grew through the course of the nineteenth century, and they learned more and better ways to produce popular journalism, mass-market journalism. It starts really with Bennett and the New York Herald early on, and then Dana, especially Dana, I think, who taught Pulitzer a lot, and Pulitzer did teach Hearst a lot.

So there is a broad tradition there, and if you go even deeper into it—I didn’t really get into this in the book—but Hearst learns a lot from Pulitzer himself, but he’s also close to a guy in Boston, I think his name was Taylor, who was an editor there who was developing a lot of the same ideas. And Pulitzer himself picked up a lot of tricks from what was called Western journalism at the time. A lot of the innovation that Pulitzer brought to New York was actually being practiced in cities like Cleveland and Saint Louis and Chicago before it hit New York. There was more of a free-for-all, hyper competitive, and innovative atmosphere outside of New York in this crucial period for Pulitzer in the 1870s and 1880s when he was learning his craft.

You note when discussing how Hearst learned his New York craft, at least, that “the Journal began to dwell less on the miseries and hard luck of ordinary people and more on the antics and misfortunes of extraodinary individuals.” To what extent do you think that model is still practiced, and to what extent does it still work?

That’s a good question. With Hearst it was a matter of balance. He still did write about ordinary people, quite a lot, but he mixed it up a lot more, and had a better sense of narrative and knew that people were naturally interested in the larger characters in their community, be they actors and actresses, or politicians and wealthy business men. I think that’s something that always remains, and is true in our time as well. But I think we’ve degraded the art a little bit in our time, with some of the relentless and relentlessly shallow celebrity coverage.

Which is a different thing altogether, really.

Hearst always had a story. On weekends they’d do features and stuff, but during the week if a celebrity hit his front page, it was for a reason.

What do you think Hearst learned from the 1896 election?

A couple of things. I think he learned that there were limits to William Jennings Bryan. While he thought that Bryan was the better candidate with the better platform, and Hearst wanted him to win, Hearst also thought that Bryan relied to heavily on the rural, agrarian vote, and didn’t really understand the cities and the immigration populations in the city. And so he learned about the limits of Bryan, though he would still for some time be supportive of the Democratic Party under Bryan. I think what’s more remarkable about the 1896 election is what Hearst learned before it, by watching Pulitzer and Dana in the 1884 election, when Dana abandoned his traditional base and ended up kind of stranded. I think Hearst believed there was a Democratic constituency in America, and it deserved a voice, and it would be good for his newspaper if he became that voice. And so I think most of the learning was done prior to the election.

How did you approach your task as a historian? One of the real strengths of the books, for me at least, is its judicious use of detail—things like Hearst’s alligator, Champagne Charley. What criteria did you use, beyond including the necessary, for shaping the book’s narrative?

I thought one of the things that was missing from most of the accounts of Hearst that I’ve read was a sensitivity to that historical moment. Most lives of Hearst tend to be sweeping things, because he lived a long time and had a very active life—over eighty when he died, and he’d been active in public life through, I think, seven decades. And when you do that, you get a lot of the sweep, but you don’t get much of the particulars.

I thought that this particular episode in New York always suffered because there was a lack of understanding of the competitive environment of the time for newspapers, and of the social environment of the time—it was one of those strange period, like the twenties, like the seventies, and perhaps like our time, when everybody was just a little on edge, and things were a bit feverish. And so a lot of the excitement in Hearst’s paper was actually a reflection of what was going on in the larger culture. And, as I try to point out in the book, a lot of the things he was doing journalistically, and are looked back on as crimes against journalism, were common practice at the time. And a lot of things around his lifestyle which seem ostentatious, or maybe even reckless—his lifestyle and his spending habits, when you look at other press lords at the time, like Gordon Bennet and Pulitzer, Hearst was at this point living relatively modestly, especially given the opportunities that were available to him, his family fortune, and the sort of life his mother wanted for him. You had to go deep into the detail to really understand what he was doing and who he was, and to see him as clearly as possible at this time.

When you’re speaking in the book of Morrill Goddard’s sixteen universal elements of human interest, you suggest a link between the decline of human-interest journalism and the fact that newspapers continue to lose their grip, as you put it, on the hearts and minds of mass audiences. Is the trend reversible?

I’m not sure. There are publications out there, mostly in the magazine industry, that are really hitting an audience and doing very well with their readers and deriving a substantial portion of their income from their readers. Very few newspapers, though. And I watch what all the newspaper publishers say about how they’re going to address the challenges ahead, and almost all of them are looking for advertising-based solutions. You know, they’ll do it on the web, or they’ll start providing events and other services for advertisers, make ourselves available on the phones, virtual trade shows online, things like that—we’re all looking for ways to please the advertisers, which I’m not against, but it surprises me that nobody looks at readers as a potential source of revenue given that, historically, for the first two centuries of the three centuries of the North American newspaper, readers were a very crucial part of the revenue model. And while I’m not certain that you can turn back the clock, and say, ‘Okay, now we’re a reader driven business, and that’s how we’re going to improve our finances,’ I think they could certainly do a lot better in that regard, and at least slow the decline.

The problem with newspapers is that they’ve relied for so long on delivering the public service, or the public utility elements of journalism—everybody has to get the newspaper in town to get the sports scores, to get the grocery ads, the basic headline news, the showtimes, to read their horoscope—and now that you can do so much of that online, what can newspapers deliver for readers that’s going to make them want to pay for it? Probably they can deliver better journalism, better stories, more interesting and compelling stories, because people still like to read print. And they’re still buying a lot of magazines, and, in Canada, a lot of newspapers—we’re a bit different than the US. This is a long answer to your question, but I guess I mean that it certainly couldn’t hurt if newspapers improved what they deliver to readers, and I think it’s worth a try. They don’t have a lot of the talent, though, that they used to have, used to attract. And that may be a taller order. So many of the bright young people who can write funny, who have a sense of where public taste is out, go into television now and don’t even consider print. The rewards are so much greater.

I know you’ve done a lot of promotional work for the book—with the big tour, interviews, and all that. Has Hearst, the master self-promoter he was, been any help when it comes to trying to get the word out about your own book?

I feel like I could use a little Hearst! I don’t think I’m very good at the promotion stuff, and he was a master of it. I think all authors could use a little Hearst.

Hire a sky-writer, and you’ll be there. Just to close, I wonder if I could get you to do a little thought experiment I’ve had in mind while reading the book. If William Randolph Hearst could take control today of the New York Times from the Sulzberger heirs, how do you think he’d go about trying to revive its flagging sales and advertising, and, arguably, relevance?

Well I’m not sure he’d take the New York Times, actually. It’s sort of the antithesis of the mass-market newspaper. I think a lot of newspapers in North America look to the Times as the gold standard, and I think that’s a mistake. It’s a great newspaper and it has amazing resources and it does its job well. But its circulation is, I think, just over 800,000. And its circulation in the city in which it exists is less than half that. So it’s a niche publication for a very discerning reader; it’s not a mass market publication, and it would be hard to make it become one. Hearst would be more likely to take one of the tabloids upscale and drive it upmarket against a broadsheet, rather than trying to take one of those broadsheets down.

But the times are very different, and one of the things that was really different about the business model that Hearst was using was that half his income, more than half his income, came from his readers, not his advertisers. One of the reasons the New York Times has been so successful over the past century—and right in this early part of the twentieth century, when the Times starts to rise and become a force, is when advertising really overtakes readers as a source of revenue—is that the New York Times was built as an advertising vehicle, and was very successful at that. Now that that model’s broken, the Times is really struggling. It will take a different kind of newspaper publisher, and a different kind of newspaper entrepreneur, to reestablish a reader-driven newspaper. As I say, I would like to think it’s possible. I’m not entirely sure it is.