Company Overview

His last utterance may or may not have been “Rosebud,” but William Randolph Hearst indisputably built an impressive media empire. The company was founded in 1887 when Hearst took over the San Francisco Examiner from his politician father, and the empire has continued to grow ever since. Hearst is one of the largest diversified communications companies in the world, operating more than 100 separate businesses. The Hearst Corporation owns 12 daily newspapers, 14 weeklies, 18 U.S. (including Cosmopolitan and Esquire) and 18 U.K. magazines, television and radio stations, stakes in cable networks, a features and comics syndicate, websites, and business publishers. The company also has significant real estate holdings. In 2000, Hearst purchased Gruner & Jahr’s U.K. magazines. In 2001, the company took a 30 percent stake in top women’s portal iVillage after its acquisition of Women.com. To complement the purchase, Hearst launched a namesake magazine based on the Lifetime channel in 2003. That same year, it bought Seventeen and Teen from Primedia. The company is owned by the Hearst family and managed by a board of trustees comprising five family and eight non-family members.