Hearst’s relative success comes with an asterisk.
Yes, print circulation and print advertising are falling as they are elsewhere, Johnson said, but “collectively, our Hearst Newsrooms are the same size as five years ago, although with much different digital skill sets.” The company is getting close to turning the corner to a 50-50 revenue split between audience and advertising, he said (pivoting over time from an 80%-plus reliance on ads). I have been intrigued by Hearst for some time because its newspapers represent a sort of counterpoint to the perception that the industry is all about financial distress and contraction. The New York Times, The Washington Post and Gannett’s USA Today Network all have that capacity, but it is less common among regional groups. Hearst also put together an interactive digital guide to the frequent floods in Texas. There, O’Rourke said, pilot projects have included an interactive wildfire tracker and a new tool to guide readers around the city’s restaurant scene. The objective is to up the division’s game in data journalism and give all of Hearst’s 24 daily papers and 52 weeklies the benefit of tools developed by a team led by O’Roarke in San Francisco. Tim O’Rourke, who is heading what the company calls its DevHub from San Francisco, says the team will be geographically dispersed and that hiring is not expedited to be completed until midyear. The San Francisco Chronicle alone now has 140,000 digital subscribers, putting it in the top rung among regional papers with titles like The Boston Globe and Minneapolis Star Tribune. If Hearst is feeling expansive, senior vice president Jeff Johnson told me in a Zoom interview, there’s a reason: The company closed the year with more than 300,000 paid digital-only subscriptions, an increase of 100,000 or 50% from the year before.
The company says that it’s the single largest digital expansion ever for the newspaper group. Hearst Newspapers are kicking off the new year with plans for a shared development hub, hiring 12 product and data specialists and another eight interactive graphic artists.
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