Popeye

Rupert Murdoch is the modern equivalent of a man named William Randalph Hearst (1863-1951) who was similarly powerful in the field (of what became) modern populist journalism.

Interestingly Hearst 'commissioned most of America's most successful comics such as 'Popeye', 'Blondie' and 'Mutt and Jeff' (Nawsaw 2002, Forward), as well as other acclaimed achievements.

Hearst invented 'yellow journalism', started a Spanish-American war, dabbled in architecture designing San Simeon, he was the inspiration for the incredible film 'Citizen Kane', and he owned 10% of America's newspaper circulation. As a child he explored Europe with his mum instead of being formally educated like other children but he still made it to Harvard, and then was asked to leave.

His journalism career began when he was in charge of San Fransisco Examiner at the age of 24. Hearst went to great lengths to make his newspapers interesting, he used more visual images, he had articles no longer than 250 words, he changed the arrangement of headlines so that anyone could easily understand the fundamentals of the content instantaneously. In San Fransisco 150 languges were spoken and there were 40 different newspapers in different languges, a perfect place for the 'tablod gold rush'. Hearst learnt to play with greed and fear, telling people that there was lots of gold (when there was not) is playing on the greed (just as Daily Mail today frequently discusses the beauty of the National Lottery).

Hearst was from the wild west and people underestimated him, yet he conquered the newspaper market, he made newspapers fun (comic strips), and played on competition. He developed a system, literally called the William Randalf Hearst Method, an actual way of approaching problems of reporting, step 1: think of a story, step 2: stand it up. There is a famous journalistic quote 'you supply the headlines I supply the war' (Hearst http://ketupa.net/hearst.htm).





This is Hearst's palace, San Simeon.






















Bibliography:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearst_castle

http://www.humboldt.edu/~jcb10/yellow.html

http://ketupa.net/hearst.htm