Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [141]
In the meantime, Pulitzer had to tend to the opening of a printing plant in Brooklyn, because the World’s main presses couldn’t keep up with demand. The paper now circulated more than a quarter of a million copies each day. To celebrate this achievement, Pulitzer sent commemorative coins set in plush-lined leather cases to advertisers and leading political figures. Slightly larger than a silver dollar, the coins were 100 percent silver, 17 percent more than the amount of silver the government used in its coins. On one side was a relief of the Statue of Liberty; the other side boasted that the World’s circulation was the largest ever attained by an American newspaper.
The paper’s average daily circulation was now three times what it had been three years earlier, when Pulitzer had already been considered a stunning success. The new high-water mark astonished newspapermen because 1887 was not an election year, when partisan fever stoked the circulation of newspapers. The World’s numerical claims were also credible even in an era when circulation figures were often unsubstantiated bragging. Pulitzer dared anyone to prove him wrong. He offered to open his books to public inspection and promised to donate $10,000 to the press club if someone found he had misstated the figures. “It is a common query in the literary clubs and among the journalistic fraternity,” said one commentator. “What in the World will Pulitzer do next?”
Even if Pulitzer ceased his constant self-promotion, the success of the World was now so widely known that it was spawning imitators in other cities. His formula worked, even for a young dropout from Harvard.
In the spring of 1887, after years of entreaties, twenty-four-year-old William Randolph Hearst persuaded his father to turn over control of the family’s money-losing San Francisco Examiner to him. He had found Harvard boring in comparison with life’s possibilities for someone with money who was eager to prove himself. Commuting to work in a fifty-foot speedboat, the tall, slender, handsome Hearst set about transforming the Examiner into a West Coast version of the World.
For years Hearst had read, studied, and cut out articles from the World. He told his father that he would make the family’s newspaper like the “New York World which is undoubtedly the best paper of the class to which the Examiner belongs—that class which appeals to the people and which depends for its success upon enterprise, energy and a certain startling originality.”
“To accomplish this,” he continued, “we must have—as the World has—active, intelligent, and energetic young men.”
Hearst needed first to break his paper’s association with its past incarnation, as Pulitzer had done when he took over the World. Almost as if he were Pulitzer in New York in 1883, Hearst resorted to every trick from Pulitzer’s playbook. He sent his reporters out to scour the poorest neighborhoods in San Francisco for tales that would make readers weep, to look in police stations and courts for crime stories that thrilled, and to search through public records to uncover corruption. The front page not only displayed the reporters’ work with headlines bold as neon lights but also trumpeted the paper’s successes as if the Examiner itself were running for office. Imitation has its rewards. The Examiner’s circulation began a steady climb.
Hearst’s approach to management also mirrored Pulitzer’s. He left no part of the operation alone, and his indefatigable presence drove his staff to work even harder. He spent