By the time he launched his first newspaper in Chicago, William Randolph Hearst was already famous as the influential publisher of the Examiner in San Francisco and the New York Journal. Hearst entered the Chicago market in 1900 by establishing the Chicago American, an evening paper; in 1902, he started a morning edition, the Chicago Examiner. In 1918, Hearst also bought the long-established Chicago Herald and merged it with his morning paper to form the Herald-Examiner. By the beginning of the 1920s, when Hearst owned 20 daily newspapers in 13 cities, his two Chicago papers each had a circulation of about 300,000, making them the third and fourth leading dailies in the city. Circulation peaked in 1929, when the American sold about 560,000 copies a day. By the mid-1930s, the Hearst papers employed about 2,500 people in Chicago. Declining sales during the Great Depression led to a merger of the morning and evening papers in 1939, creating the Chicago Herald-American (later reverting to the Chicago American ). In 1956, the Hearst paper was purchased by the Tribune Co., which proceeded to publish it as an evening paper under the names Chicago's American and (starting in 1969) Chicago Today. In 1974, the remnants of the Hearst paper were absorbed by the Chicago Tribune.

This entry is part of the Encyclopedia's Dictionary of Leading Chicago Businesses (1820-2000) that was prepared by Mark R. Wilson, with additional contributions from Stephen R. Porter and Janice L. Reiff.