About Los Angeles Herald Examiner

Los Angeles Herald Examiner

The Los Angeles Herald Examiner was a major daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, from 1962 until November 2, 1989. Formed by the merger of Hearst's morning Los Angeles Examiner and afternoon Los Angeles Herald-Express, it was published in the afternoon Monday to Friday and in the morning on Saturdays and Sundays. For a few years after the merger it had the largest afternoon-newspaper circulation in the United States, peaking at about 730,000 copies in the mid-1960s. A strike that lasted almost a decade, beginning in 1967, halved its circulation and drove away advertisers, and despite a celebrated editorial revival in the late 1970s it never recovered. When it closed, the Los Angeles Times was left as the city's sole citywide daily.

Formation in 1962

The Herald Examiner was formed when the afternoon Herald-Express and the morning Los Angeles Examiner, both published in Los Angeles since the turn of the twentieth century and both owned by the Hearst organization, merged in 1962. The Herald-Express had itself been the result of a 1931 merger between the Los Angeles Evening Express and the Evening Herald. The Hearst Corporation decided to make the new Herald Examiner an afternoon paper, leaving the morning field to the Los Angeles Times, which at the same time ceased publication of its evening Mirror. The Examiner printed its last separate edition on January 7, 1962. The combined paper was headquartered in the historic Examiner building at 146 West 11th Street in downtown Los Angeles, the Mission and Spanish Colonial Revival structure designed by Julia Morgan, which was designated Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument No. 178 on August 18, 1977.

The Two Parent Papers

The Herald Examiner inherited two distinct journalistic traditions. The Examiner, founded by William Randolph Hearst in 1903 to assist his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, complement his San Francisco Examiner, and provide a union-friendly answer to the Los Angeles Times, had reached a peak circulation of 381,037 in 1960 and flourished in the 1940s under city editor James H. Richardson, who emphasized crime and Hollywood scandal coverage. The Herald-Express excelled in tabloid journalism under city editor Agness Underwood, a veteran crime reporter who had come from the Los Angeles Record first as a reporter and later became its city editor. With the 1962 merger the newspaper became an afternoon-only paper. Underwood remained on the staff in an upper management position after the merger, leaving day-to-day operations to younger editors, and Richardson had retired in 1957, so the combined paper began with the reputations, if not the daily leadership, of two of Los Angeles's most famous city editors.

Largest Afternoon Circulation in America

For a few years after the merger, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner had the largest afternoon-newspaper circulation in the United States. Its circulation reached a high of about 730,000 in the mid-1960s, and at the start of the 1967 strike it stood at about 721,000 daily, with some 2,000 employees. Along with its competitor up Broadway, the Los Angeles Times, it was one of the two remaining citywide newspapers based in downtown Los Angeles. Yet the structure of the market was already working against it: readers' tastes and demographics were changing, afternoon readership was declining as television news grew more prominent, expanding suburbs made rush-hour distribution harder, and the spread of night sports games meant evening newspapers could no longer print full results. After the merger, readership of the morning Los Angeles Times soared to 757,000 weekday readers and more than one million on Sunday.

The Black Dahlia Inheritance

Although the famous case belonged to the Examiner era, the Herald Examiner carried its legacy. The Examiner had been the first newspaper to break the story of the 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short, who was dubbed the Black Dahlia by Herald-Express crime reporter Bevo Means. Examiner reporters reached the scene in Leimert Park on January 15, 1947, published an extra edition two hours ahead of the afternoon papers, and arranged for the victim's fingerprints to be transmitted to the FBI by the paper's soundphoto machine, leading to her identification. The case was never solved, but it led Los Angeles front pages for three months and defined the crime-reporting tradition that the merged paper inherited from both of its parents — a tradition the Herald Examiner's own crime and courts reporting continued.

The William Farr Case

During the 1970 Los Angeles murder trial of Charles Manson and his followers, Herald Examiner reporter William Farr reported that Manson had planned to murder Elizabeth Taylor and Frank Sinatra. The trial judge, Charles Older, ordered Farr to divulge his sources. Farr refused, citing California's reporters' shield law, but Older ruled that because Farr had by then left the Herald Examiner for the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office, and later the Los Angeles Times, he was no longer a journalist and had to hand over his notes. Farr continued to refuse and was jailed for 48 days, from 1972 to January 11, 1973, on a contempt citation, before being released by order of United States Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas while the decision was on appeal. The Farr case in effect strengthened the California shield law and served as a precedent in future shield-law cases involving journalists, giving the Herald Examiner a lasting place in American press-freedom law.

The Decade-Long Strike, 1967–1977

On December 15, 1967, Herald Examiner employees began a strike that lasted almost a decade and resulted in at least $15 million in losses. Owner William Randolph Hearst Jr.'s confrontational response prolonged the unrest: Hearst hired replacement employees to keep the paper publishing, as well as Pinkerton guards to maintain security, protect the strike-breakers, and harass the strikers. Numerous violent incidents took place between pickets and replacement workers, as well as confrontations between the guards and the Los Angeles Police Department. The unions campaigned effectively to the paper's working-class readership, urging subscribers to cancel. The strike ended in March 1977, with circulation having dropped to about 350,000 — roughly half its pre-strike level — and the number of employees to 700. In 1976, elections had decertified the original unions involved in the strike and created a new union, which negotiated a new three-year contract in March 1977. Many veteran reporters left during the strike and never returned, and advertisers were reluctant to buy space in the weakened paper, causing revenue to fall further. The paper never recovered from the strike.

The Bellows Revival

The paper enjoyed a journalistic and spiritual renaissance beginning in 1978, when Jim Bellows was hired as editor. Bellows, who had earlier edited the Washington Star, and his successor, Mary Ann Dolan, brought an infusion of new talent, youth, and energy to the newsroom. The excitement of rejuvenating a newspaper with a storied past attracted a stream of young journalists, many with Ivy League credentials. The paper's scrappy, no-holds-barred, often unconventional coverage repeatedly challenged the dominant Los Angeles Times on stories about City Hall, local politics, the Los Angeles Police Department, the arts, and sports, and its coverage was recognized repeatedly for excellence by the Los Angeles Press Club. The paper was eclectic: its entertainment section was hip, its sports section was blue-collar, and its news pages straddled the tabloid and muckraking genres. However, as an after-effect of the ten-year strike, advertising and circulation continued to decline despite the editorial revival.

Return to Mornings and Final Decline

In 1982 the paper switched back to morning publication, twenty years after the merger had made it an afternoon paper; the change did little to improve sagging revenue and readership. Having two editions led to higher production costs, and the afternoon edition was dropped during 1989. By that year the circulation had fallen to about 238,000 to 242,000, while the competing Los Angeles Times had a circulation roughly four times larger. Meanwhile the paper's once-splendid 1913-era Julia Morgan building had deteriorated; an editorial writer later recalled that its ground-floor arched windows had long been covered over because of vandalism and that most of the interior had become a cheap 1950s-era retrofit, leaving the lobby and staircase as the main survivals of the original design. Analyses of the paper's death cited five causes: the 1962 agreement that left the Times alone in the morning, the crippling strike, advertisers alienated by Hearst's conduct of the strike, the growth of Los Angeles that complicated delivery, and disunity and disinterest in management.

Closure on November 2, 1989

In 1989 the Hearst Corporation attempted to sell the moribund newspaper but found no suitable buyers; News Corporation intended to buy the paper and turn it into a tabloid, but backed out. Hearst then shut the newspaper down. On November 2, 1989, the paper printed its last edition, with a banner headline reading "SO LONG, L.A.!" The final edition ended an 86-year relationship between Hearst's newspaper division and Los Angeles, dating back to the Examiner's founding in 1903. After the paper folded, some of its editors, reporters, columnists, and syndicated cartoons migrated to the Los Angeles Times, and the Los Angeles Daily News, based in the San Fernando Valley, attempted to take its place as a second citywide voice. The Herald Examiner's issues were preserved on microfilm at the downtown branch of the Los Angeles Public Library.

Legacy

The Los Angeles Herald Examiner was remembered as a paper of two lives: the circulation giant of the mid-1960s, the largest afternoon newspaper in America, and the scrappy, critically praised underdog of the Bellows years. Its demise was studied as a case history in labor relations — an oral-history study by former employees identified the decade-long strike as the most crucial factor in its death — and its building survived as a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument, frequently rented as a filming location. The paper's closure left Los Angeles, the nation's second-largest city, with a single citywide daily, a condition that persisted for decades afterward. For journalists who had worked there, the Herald Examiner represented the last of the old Hearst afternoon papers: loud, competitive, and unwilling, until the very end, to imitate its more powerful rival up Broadway.