What's next for Hearst?

Richard Tofel, founding general manager and eventual president of Pro Publica, interviewed Hearst CEO Steve Swartz in early October about why the company was buying newspapers. It was decent-good on the corporate side, but didn't ask about further buys in Texas and was also a bit of turd-polishing on Hearst as a company. I posted a link to my own reporting of about two months ago, shortly before Hearst closed the deal to buy THE Dallas Morning News; it didn't draw comment or a "like" from him. (I get a "like" about half the time.) 

On the turd-polishing? This Q and A:

RT: Do you think it’s an advantage for Hearst to be privately rather than publicly held in today’s news business? 

SS: We think we’re better off being privately held. We try to hold ourselves to high standards in terms of performance in every way, and we benchmark ourselves against whatever relevant public company is out there, in whatever space we’re operating in, to say, are we keeping up, whether it’s in terms of quality or financial performance. But I think the ability to have a long term focus is an advantage when you’re privately held. 

RT: I’ve seen reports suggesting that if you were to sell all your news holdings, that your overall profit margins would rise. If that’s true, does it matter to you, or does the history of the company that you talked about at the outset outweigh that? 

SS: We think it’s important that every business of ours be able to stand on its own two feet. We wouldn’t be in a sector, or we wouldn’t have a division, that was purely losing money and unable to generate enough cash to take care of its employees, to take care of their benefits, their retirement. You have to be able to invest. Sometimes you even have to replace the printing press. So I think having some profit margin is important for each individual business. 

There is no question that our journalism businesses, particularly our newspaper businesses and our magazine businesses, run at a much lower profit margin than a number of our other businesses. If we were publicly traded, that could be more of a focus for outside investors. We’re a strong company. We have a very strong balance sheet. We believe in the magazine and newspaper business. We understand that those businesses do not run at a very high profit margin, but we believe they contribute a lot to society and help make us a more special company.

There you go. (Emphases added.) Greenwashing?

Commenters called out Swartz for his take on nonprofits, which I don't think was entirely wrong, but also did seem a bit stereotypical. Tofel agreed on split-the-middle on this. They even more called out Swartz for his claim about how much local presence Hearst still has. Having a degree of familiarity with Beaumont today and Midland in the past, this call-out is totally correct. Tofel didn't really comment on that. 

With Hearst, already owning Houston, San Antonio, Austin (I forgot that they bought the Stateless earlier this year, somehow) Laredo, Beaumont and Midland, along with a few yet-smaller properties, is its purchase of the Dallas Snooze good for journalism in Texas? Michael Hardy discussed that a little while back at Texas Monthly.

Among things of note? That Monthly piece belies Swartz on one thing. Here in Tex-ass, the company already had Nancy Barnes as executive editor of all papers. 

My thoughts?

It is the tough issue above, tougher for the Snooze's employees yet, and I'll get more below.

I can say that, at a minimum, it's better than vulture capitalist Alden owning the Snooze, Michael. On the other hand, especially seeing how the SA Express-News is treated as not much more than an appendage of the Houston Chronic, and suspecting that's started happening at the Austin Stateless, and knowing that it's surely happened to Beaumont, which is otherwise in the crapper, I can understand worries about how other papers outside Houston will lose, or have already lost, individual identities.

But, that's a lesser issue than the future of journalism. Even if the Chronic itself hasn't been gutted, the Stateless acquisition shows Hearst is no white knight overall:

Some journalists at Hearst’s Texas papers have a less rosy view of their employer. When Hearst bought the Statesman this spring, it declined to ratify the contract that the paper’s union had signed with Gannett just a few months earlier. Hearst and the union are in negotiations over a new contract; in the meantime, the company has laid off the paper’s copy editors, eliminated job protections, and cut some employee benefits. In May, the Austin News Guild filed an unfair labor practices charge against Hearst with the National Labor Relations Board.

I mean, yes, with more and more of a truly digital first world? Those copy editing positions are dead in the water. Do you want to pick up a reporter's notebook or microcasette player?

But? Some are still needed, and laying them ALL off sure as hell looks like union-busting. It does so to the unionized in Dallas, and at Hearst papers elsewhere:

In July, the union issued a statement on X expressing alarm at the paper’s sale: “The experiences of our colleagues at other Hearst papers have left us with concerns that we look forward to addressing with Hearst leadership.” This was followed by an open letter to Hearst from unionized journalists in California, Connecticut, New York, and Texas urging the company to refrain from “intimidation tactics and inappropriate discipline meant to scare journalists into silence or complacency.”

Ugh.

An additional problem is that Hearst is privately owned, so it can say it needs to bust unions for the bottom line, but, unless somebody leaks some financials, who can tell, and there's no shareholder pressure anyway. Swartz notes this as a value of being private.

Now, how does this play out in the longer term?

Beyond Hearst? Craphouse (sic), the half of the post-merger company that is the tail wagging the dog of the new Gannett, owns El Paso, Amarillo, Lubbock, San Angelo, Abilene and Corpus Christi, and continues to implode. In other words, outside of Odessa, two chains own all dailies in West and West Central Texas, and Hearst making a bid for Odessa and a consolidation with Midland wouldn't surprise me. CNHI, a chain that's the crappiest one not owned by a hedge fund, owns many newspapers in Texas that were dailies before COVID. It's not quite imploding, but just falling apart more and more. 

The StartleGram is owned by hedge-fund controlled McClatchy, or McLatchKey, which also continues to implode.

Papers inside or near the Triangle, since, setting aside Cowtown, Hearst will now pretty much control all points? Temple remains privately owned by the Mayborn family and won't be sold. Waco and Bryan-College Station are both part of Lee Enterprises, whose flagship is the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. They might sell.

Per a piece I wrote 10 months ago, if this David Hoffmann still owned, as of September 2025, a slice of the Snooze, since he also owns a slice of Lee, at least looking at Waco and BCS, if not far beyond that?  (As of of early September 2025, per this story, Hoffmann was now one of the top two Lee investors and was still trying to buy the company outright, and still owned his slice of the Snooze.)

In the Valley? Hearst, if the price is right, might look to move further south from Laredo. It wouldn't need to buy everything, just one or another of Brownsville, Harlingen etc, and then use its growing clout. (The partial carcass of FreeDumb Communications owns both those plus McAllen.)

That leaves East Texas, east of where CNHI trails off, as more competitive for now.

Handing Harper's magazine a mirror

Harper's runs a piece about why people don't trust the media any more and fails to mention the infamous Harper's letter of 2020. 

The whole piece is not bad. Jelani Cobb at CJR has good insights, as does the oft-curmudgeonly Jack Shafer. Taylor Lorenz focuses too much early on, on Gaza, though we've seen how fair chunks of the MSM, although they've moderated giving blank checks to Zionist Israel, still have not officially retracted old stories. Max Tani of Semafor cites COVID coverage as a big issue. He's right to fair degree, though Cobb pushes back on some of that with this:

I’m not sure that there’s a correlation between the mistakes the media has made and the distrust the public feels toward it. Here’s what I mean: every one of us has been in a conversation in which someone says, “What the media won’t tell you . . . ” There are certain sentences that, when you hear the first half, you should immediately ignore the second half—and that’s one of them. The reason is that, 99 percent of the time, when someone says, “The media won’t tell you this,” it’s because the thing they’re talking about is either not true or is not true in the way they conceive it to be. Or they have a pet conspiracy theory that no one else shares, and the media won’t validate their viewpoint.

He goes on to connect that with declines in the trust in institutions in general. 

Shafer notes that capitalist owners have led to a retreat in pushback against Trump, although he adds exceptions like the New York Times.

At the same time, Lorenz and Cobb note the financial costs in fighting Trump for smaller outlets. 

Next, Harper's facilitator asks the four about AI. Lorenz, especially, notes that, by cutting entry-level journalism jobs, it may raise the barrier to entry even higher, even as the type of people Cobb references will double down on AI slop.

Then, we get to the future. Shafer rightly, in line with what I have long thought, calls out print media for fucking up for decades:

The newspaper industry, again and again, has flubbed its chance to propel itself into the future. This started in the years following World War II, when newspaper readers increasingly turned to television. In the mid-Seventies, the media critic for the Los Angeles Times, David Shaw, wrote a big page-one story about how the thing that you’re holding in your hands is an endangered species. Newspaper publishers and editors were all aware that papers were losing their moxie. 

In one of his shareholder letters in the early Nineties, Warren Buffett said something to the effect of: “I love the newspaper business. I’ve been a great investor in Buffalo News and the Washington Post. But these properties are not delivering the return on investment they once did.” This was before the web. He’s not saying newspapers are dying because of the web. He’s saying that other transformations, including greater consumer choice, were already taking place. 

The newspaper industry has had warning for seventy-five-plus years that an end is coming and that it either needs to create, innovate, and discover or step aside. When you look at what happened to newspapers in the web era, just about all of them got it wrong. 

The incumbent media is not always the best vehicle to propel journalism into the future. The future is going to require innovation and ideas that we’re not privy to in this conversation. It’s going to require people finding the ability to attract audiences, hold on to them, and give them some value that they didn’t have before.

Amen.

The other three? They strike me as way too optimistic about new media in forms such as Substack. Frankly, I think they're engaging in some form of availability bias or similar. They see people they know, who have abandoned legacy or semi-legacy, print media, or who have like them, started new outlets on their own, but only after they built up credibility and audience at a legacy or semi-legacy site, and think, "that's easy."

It is true that new media for targeted audiences, mentioned especially by Cobb, is growing. But, general-audience new media that's trustworthy? Not really.