Hearst Communications
American multinational mass media conglomerate group

Hearst Communications Inc. is an American multinational mass media and business information conglomerate owned by the Hearst family and based in Hearst Tower in Midtown Manhattan in New York City.
Hearst owns newspapers, magazines, television channels, and television stations, including the Albany Times-Union, Houston Chronicle, Austin American-Statesman, San Francisco Chronicle, Cosmopolitan and Esquire. It owns 50 percent of the A+E Global Media cable network group and 18 percent of the sports television company ESPN Inc. The conglomerate also owns Fitch Group and First Databank.
The company was founded by William Randolph Hearst, a newspaper owner who was most well known for his use of yellow journalism. The Hearst family remains involved in its ownership and management.
History
Formative years
In 1880, George Hearst, mining entrepreneur and U.S. senator, bought the San Francisco Daily Examiner. In 1887, he turned the Examiner over to his son, William Randolph Hearst, who that year founded the Hearst Corporation.
Peak era
In the 1920s and 1930s, Hearst owned the biggest media conglomerate in the world, which included a number of magazines and newspapers in major cities.
The public source identifies “Hearst Communications” as american multinational mass media conglomerate group. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Hearst, Communications and American.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1065024. VIAF identifies the subject as 125502374. The Library of Congress control number is n80097919. 4 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1880 and 1887.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hearst Communications” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.