The Good Citizen
A conversation with Hearst chairman and Alta editor William Randolph Hearst III. Interview by George Gendron
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THIS EPISODE IS MADE POSSIBLE BY OUR FRIENDS AT COMMERCIAL TYPE AND FREEPORT PRESS.
This episode is a special one for us here at Magazeum. We even gave it its own code name: “Project Rosebud” (IYKYK). But if you only know our guest as the grandson of the man who inspired the lead character in the film classic Citizen Kane and the founder of one of the largest publishing empires in the world, you are missing out.
Will Hearst could have done the easy thing, but he chose not to. As the current chairman of the Hearst Corporation, Will balances stewardship of the sprawling media empire with a commitment to community and lasting value. Unlike the new breed of media moguls, his leadership is less about compliance and more about the continuing importance of fostering quality journalism rooted in place and purpose.
But aside from his role as a suit at the Hearst Corporation, Will’s labor of love is Alta—an indie quarterly that champions a distinct West Coast voice, providing a vital counterpoint to the East Coast lens that still dominates the national discourse.
Alta is crafted to be held and savored—he thinks of its subscribers as members more than a mailing list. In an age dominated by volume, speed, and algorithms, Will Hearst would like to remind us to slow down, listen deeply, and consume wisely.
In times like these, his vision seems almost Quixotic—to see media as craft, culture as inheritance, and storytelling as something lasting. Nevertheless, he continues to charge, shaping a legacy both ancient and urgently new.
George Gendron: One of the best things that’s ever been written about you was written by Arthur Lubow in 1985 in Vanity Fair.
Will Hearst: I don’t remember that one.
George Gendron: Oh my god, Arthur is just a wonderful writer and he was obviously a very big fan of yours and just did a wonderful job of capturing the charm of a man who doesn’t flaunt his wealth or his family connection.
Will Hearst: Yeah, I remember being described when I worked for Jan Wenner as the, what was it? Oh God, he had some tagline, something about “a rumpled, balding millionaire.” That was my kind of sobriquet. And at least two or three of those are true: I’m rumpled and balding.
George Gendron: Somebody on the fashion side. Patrick mentioned just as we were getting ready to go live on this podcast that we probably have featured half of your Alta editorial board on our podcast.
Will Hearst: Yeah.
George Gendron: And one of them, she’ll remain nameless, said you’ve got to ask him, “Does he still consider himself the most modestly-dressed member of the Forbes 400?”
Will Hearst: I thought Mark Zuckerberg had that award.
George Gendron: Not anymore, he doesn’t. Not the new Mark.
Will Hearst: The new, buff mark.
George Gendron: “Buff” Mark. I can’t even look at those pictures. I do want to talk to you about, you’ve got this really interesting lens or dual lenses—an old Rolleiflex—through which you look at the world of media. On the one hand, you have a really interesting indie magazine, on the West Coast and on the other you’re the chairman of the board of Hearst.
Will Hearst: I’m happy to talk about either of those. The company is still a private company. But I think we did something that not a lot of private companies did. We—through my grandfather’s recommendation—hired management people that were not family members.
George Gendron: Right.
Will Hearst: Sometimes in family businesses one wing of the family becomes the powerful part. And then they fight with the people that don’t feel they’re being given enough attention. Whereas I think Hearst approached it more like, “Look, we’re a corporation. We should have really good managers.” We’re shareholders or we’re like shareholders. And so we should be interested in the success of the enterprise. Not which cousin is the editor-in-chief and which one is the CEO. So partly through the wisdom of my grandfather, partly because it works so well, we’ve stayed with that system. And it’s worked very well for us.
George Gendron: And so what does that mean for you personally now?
Will Hearst: Well, it means that I’m the chairman of the board. I chair the meetings. I talked to the management. I think the only thing I don’t do is I’m not a day-to-day manager of the company. I don’t hire and fire editors and publishers, but I look at the long-term view. I talked to a very wise banker the other day and he said, “If management has a long term view and the owners have a short term view—let’s say the owners are a hedge fund and they want to know when are we going to get the money back?—you have a problem.”
But if you go the other way and the managers have a short-term view: Are we going to make the quarter? And the owners have a long term view: What do we stand for? What are we trying to do? What’s our goal?
That works much better. And that’s, I think, the way the Hearst Corporation has been run. We have people who run it who are very good at quarter-by-quarter performance, and we have owners that are looking to the horizon.
George Gendron: Both Patrick and I in a prior life worked with David Carey—
Will Hearst: Yeah.
George Gendron: —your head of communications. And I was struck by how David retired, or at least ostensibly did, and then went to the Harvard program. And then at the end of it, instead of going off to save the rainforest, he goes back to work at Hearst.
Will Hearst: Yeah. I think David has had a time period where he’s been deciding what he really wants to do. What’s it really all about? He was a very good manager of the magazine division, and he had the benefit of having worked for Condé Nast and having worked for Hearst. So he’s had the stereo picture of the whole publishing industry. But I think he just got to a place where he thought, Maybe I should do something different with my life.
And then that didn’t turn out to be quite as much fun, and then he wanted to come back, but we’d already moved on to have Debbie run the magazine division. And I think so, David is finding his place. He’s a very smart guy. He has tremendous knowledge of the publishing industry. And he’s certainly an easy, fun, smart person to deal with. So we’re very glad to have him back.
George Gendron: Yeah. And he’s on your board too.
Will Hearst: He is, yeah.
George Gendron: Okay. So tell me now, let’s just focus on Hearst for a second.
Will Hearst: Sure.
George Gendron: What role does print—both newspaper and magazine—what role do those two collectively play in the financial life of Hearst?
Will Hearst: To ask that question, you have to answer, “Where does print play in the world?” Right? And I think you have to take it case by case. In the newspaper business, what we’ve discovered is that the newspaper franchise is not printing. You know, newspapers used to always own their own press. Now that’s not always true. We print other people’s newspapers, they print us.
So the physical manufacturing of the print is not really the product. The product is the community. The product is being the information source for a piece of geography. Newspapers are very geographic. The San Francisco Chronicle serves the Bay Area and San Francisco.
Now, if you’re interested in what is happening here, you might be a subscriber from New York, but our focus is local. You don’t subscribe to the Chronicle to find out what’s going on in Ukraine. You subscribe to the Chronicle to find out, "Which restaurant should I go to?"
George Gendron: For some newspapers, that can be a bitter pill to swallow.
Will Hearst: It’s a change. It’s a change. I used to say you have to have a certain passion for newspapering and for public service to be in the newspaper business in the year 2024. There was a time period in the seventies where you were the most powerful person in the town. You were like the mayor.
And if that’s your motive, newspapers may not offer that to you anymore. So if I told you that I have a bridle and tack shop in Vermont, it’s been profitable every year since 1920. Are you interested? You might say, “I don’t think so.” But if I offered you a newspaper in Sonoma or in the Gold Country, and you love that place and you could be interested in that community and serving that community and being involved with that community, you might decide, Yeah I’m willing to do that. I’m not going to be on Facebook. I’m going to be a more modest business relative to every great fortune in the year 2024.
And you won’t serve that community well, if you only print. You’ll have to have a website. You’ll have to have membership. You’ll have to have newsletters. You’ll have to have a podcast. You’ll have to find a way to serve the community with information of relevance to people that live there. That’s the newspaper business today.
George Gendron: You’re not talking about local newspapers as a “trophy acquisition.” You’re talking about people who really have a passion and a mission for it.
Will Hearst: I just think if you’re in it for the trophy, you’re not going to get a very big trophy.
George Gendron: Yeah.
Will Hearst: Now, maybe if you’re The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, that’s a little bit different. But I think in the generic newspaper that serves a community, city of a hundred thousand, city of a half a million, you better be serving that community. You’re not going to be covering Ukraine. I remember when Newsday opened a bureau in Kurdistan! And it was like, those days are over pal! That’s not happening anymore.
George Gendron: I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, but at any rate we’ll keep going.
Will Hearst: We all did that. We were all sucked into wanting to be the miniature New York Times.
George Gendron: Yes.
Will Hearst: I think newspapers still are very viable as a business, but it’s not Mark Twain anymore. You have to be serving this community. You have to be really passionate about local news. Magazines are a bit different because they were always national franchises by definition.
George Gendron: Right.
Will Hearst: So if you’re covering fashion or you’re covering sports or you’re covering any of the things that magazines cover, I think in some ways, they’re a more struggling enterprise. Newspapers have figured out, This is what we can do and this is what we can’t do.
George Gendron: Okay, so somebody comes to you, Will, and says, based on what you just said to me, point me to what you would consider to be the model newspaper for the 21st century as a business.
Will Hearst: I think the San Francisco Chronicle has done a lot of good work in shaping what we do and what we don’t do. But I think if you took a city of a certain size—I’ve not looked at it deeply —the Houston Chronicle is a very good newspaper for us. We’re still looking for those sort of small to large—I don’t think we’re looking for the Chicagos and the LAs, but we’re looking for the Portlands, and the Austins, and the cities where there’s an identity and where the people that live there really want to know what’s going on there.
I think you can still be a very fun newspaper person in a small community, but if you’re going to have a website, if you’re going to do all these things, you need a certain scale. One of the things that I’ve learned about websites is they’re much more like television stations than they are like publishing companies, because you’re dealing with immediacy and you have to refresh the product on a 24-hour basis. So you have to have a staff of a certain size. So if I have to have a staff of 20 or 30 or 40 people, I have to have a city of a certain size to sustain that. I can’t do that in you know, Gualala. I can’t do that in Mendocino.
George Gendron: Maybe this is beyond your purview, but what do you do for local news for all of those towns and cities that fall below that threshold that you’re describing?
Will Hearst: You might be able to do a newsletter. You might be able to do a weekly. I don’t have a good solution to that problem. I think there’s a passion for those communities to have that information and they need it to keep the government honest, to deal with planning and housing and education, the police force, and all those issues.
I mean, I noticed that when people moved to San Francisco from the East Coast when I was publisher here—let’s say you’re 22 years old. You just got out of college. What do you care about the planning commission? What do you care about the school board? But now you’ve been here for 10 years and you have two or three kids and you want to do a porch on the back of your house, all of a sudden all these things are a lot more relevant to your experience.
So we needed to capture those people as they turned from 25 to 35 to 45. And a lot of people in media wanted to deal with youth and I kept saying, no youth is too young to appreciate what it is that we are good at!
George Gendron: Boy is that true.
Will Hearst: We’re not rock and roll. We’re not eye candy.
George Gendron: Yeah.
Will Hearst: We offer a different product. When I was a young reporter, if you misspelled somebody’s name, you could get fired. If you went to a demonstration and you said there were a hundred people when there were a thousand, the editor said, “What are you doing? Why are you in this business?” There was a sort of a mandate to a certain level of accuracy and reportorial—
George Gendron: —that was true even in some of the magazine business.
Will Hearst: Absolutely! The really good magazines still have a fact-checking department. And I submit articles to Alta and I get a call from Blaise Zerega, he’s fact checking saying, “Where did you get that quote? Is that an exact quote? Can you tell me where you got that?” And it’s like, “Hey I’m, Rupert Murdoch, I own this thing!”
George Gendron: Yes.
Will Hearst: But I understand the point, which is, we’re trying to push a certain quality picture. And everybody’s got to sign up for that.
George Gendron: Now let’s stick with newspapers for a second. And this might confuse readers. But in addition to being the chair of Hearst, you’re also the chair of the Hearst Foundation.
Will Hearst: Yes.
George Gendron: And I want to talk about a very particular aspect of this and see if we can tie it back to newspapers—
Will Hearst: Right, right, right.
George Gendron: —and that is that you guys fund young writers and journalists.
Will Hearst: Yes. We have a journalism program.
George Gendron: There’s talk about how increasingly in certain areas, both urban and rural student journalists and their publications are beginning to actually play a role that traditional hometown newspapers used to.
Will Hearst: I’ll tell you something really interesting. I go to the Hearst Journalism Awards. I’m always struck by the people that are competing in these contests. 30 years ago, they wanted to be a writer, they wanted to be a photographer. But these young people, they know HTML. They can shoot their own video. They can write a blog. They can write on deadline. There’s a generation of people that are really sincerely interested in committing journalism.
George Gendron: Oh yeah.
Will Hearst: Much more talented and much more multi-talented. And they have a passion. I used to tell people if you’re a journalist and you’re in your sixties, okay, you’re going to retire soon, it’s going to be okay.
And if you’re really young, you’re coming in with all these new skills and attitudes and ability to see the world differently—the worst person is the person in the middle. The 40 year old journalist is too old to learn the new technology, but not old enough to retire. But I just couldn’t find a way to retire.
I’m one of those people that’s never been bored in my life. And I believe in lifelong learning. And one of the inspirations for Alta was to serve the community of people that still want to connect to the world and find out about literature and writing.
And when we started Alta, I used to say, “No publication ever went into bankruptcy court and said, ‘we paid the writers too much, it killed us.’” It’s the printer, it’s the advertising, the distribution. The inner core of the thing is never the thing that really kills you.
George Gendron: You have a great quote—because I do want to step back because there might be one or two listeners who don’t know what Alta is. You said something about one of the things that you loved about a quarterly was that you “lose money very slowly.”
Will Hearst: Yes. I was an internet person very early. I worked for a venture capital firm. We invested in Netscape. We invested in Amazon and Google. So I feel very comfortable and I use the internet every day and I love it, but it has some of the characteristics of immediacy and you need to have a big staff.
And so I want it to slow the whole thing down. And say what about the people that go to bookstores? What about the people that read The Paris Review or read The Economist or read The New York Review? Could we find a way to be a player in that space? And when I was in the newspaper business, the front page was politics, crime, immediacy.
And newspapers, they were the original immediate medium, and they were competing with television. Now television is competing with the internet. And I just wanted to step away from that and say, “Okay, let’s see. The ‘back of the book’ of newspapers was theater, movies, criticism, restaurants, style section, which were considered ‘soft news.’ That’s where the ‘B players’ went. The ‘A players’ went into the news.”
But my feeling was when the internet came along, everybody was going to be racing to file in 20 minutes. What if we just stepped back and some of the writers that I knew were people that needed more time to do an investigative piece or needed more time to write a book, or just naturally wanted to analyze a problem more deeply: what if we served that community, which might not be as big as the mainstream immediacy community, but I believe in what Michael Porter says, “compete to be different.” Could we be the best at something that was maybe a little bit smaller, but we could really be good at it?
George Gendron: Where were we time wise when we started thinking about all this?
Will Hearst: I thought about this 20-30 years ago when I would talk to people at cocktail parties. I mean, when I left the newspaper business, I went to work for Jann Wenner in ’76, then I went back to the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner in LA until the mid ’80s. Then I worked in cable television until the mid ’90s.
I worked for the newspaper from ’84 to sort of ’94-ish. I think when I got out of newspapers I thought, The internet is coming. But I remembered this sort of shortcoming of traditional newspapers, that they would be overtaken by the immediacy of the internet. Mike Sragow, that was a writer for the paper, kept saying—
George Gendron: I know Michael very well.
Will Hearst: —I know. And Michael said to me, “More people go to arts and culture events than go to sporting events.” We’re not talking about television. I’m talking about physical gate. If you add up museums and concerts and cultural events, more people in a given city, like San Francisco, attend than go to sports.
And I thought, That can’t be right. But that’s what the numbers said. So I thought, Let’s try and serve that community. I think it became like a project in the year 2000, but it was an idea going back to the mid ’90s.
George Gendron: That’s not that uncommon in magazines. You find people have mulled over an idea for ages and then all of a sudden something happens. And it can be externally, internally, and now it’s time to go. So when did you launch?
Will Hearst: I was friends with the writer Jim Harrison, and we were talking about doing a movie about Gary Snyder. I would pitch him the idea for the movie, and he said, “Are you going to keep talking about this, or are you going to do something?” And so I felt like at some point you have to shut up or act.
George Gendron: When did you act? When did you launch Alta?
Will Hearst: I think we’re about seven years old now, seven or eight years old. We’ve done four issues a year. We haven’t done 50 issues, but we’ve done probably 25 or so.
George Gendron: And you described wanting to create a West Coast equivalent of The New Yorker.
Will Hearst: You know, I’m a big believer in “compete to be different.” And I thought The New York Review does a very good job, The New Yorker does a very good job in arts and culture, but because they’re weekly, they have to cover Trump, they have to cover elections, they have to do all this.
David Remnick’s a very good friend of mine, somebody I enormously respect, but I think that’s like a crazy idea for a magazine. Are you current events or are you long-term thinking? I don’t know.
George Gendron: David, of course, his response to that would be “all of the above.”
Will Hearst: Okay, great. Well, he’s probably got the budget to do “all of the above.” If you have enough money, you can have your own space program. You can boil the ocean.
George Gendron: Yes, you can.
Will Hearst: I wanted something that we could fund in perpetuity.
George Gendron: Let me stop you here because I think, and I’m inferring this is true, I don’t know if I’ve ever actually heard you explicitly say this, that you felt that whether we—traditional magazine editors, writers, designers, and readers—were aware of the fact that these magazines do look at the world through a particular lens and that lens is very Northeast-centric. It just is.
Will Hearst: Yeah. That’s what I thought. I thought these guys do a really good job, but they tend to look like The New Yorker cartoon: there’s the Hudson River, and then the Midwest, and then Tokyo. And I wanted to turn the cartoon backwards. And I thought of California as surfing, and the Beach Boys, and the Beat Generation, and we have native arts and culture movements and perspectives that are not better, but they’re just a little bit different.
I would often say to people, “Oh, you seem like a very talented person. Why don’t you move to New York?”
And they would say, “I don’t really want to move to New York.”
That’s what the magazine is about. It’s about all the things that make you feel this is your place. And nobody else was doing that. There were regional publications like Sunset and New West, but they were traditional magazines covering the West. I wanted to do something more like The New Yorker or Vanity Fair, or even The Economist or The Paris Review, but I wanted to do it from The New Yorker cartoon, looking at the rest of the world from here.
George Gendron: Yes. How do you feel you’ve succeeded in that?
Will Hearst: I think we’ve done a pretty good job. We sit in our editorial meetings—I hope we’re not being parochial, but we look for articles that people that live here would respond to or that represent this perspective.
But if I had a little more time and a little more money, I could imagine Alta having a Jane Kramer “Letter from Paris,” or maybe a “Letter from Brooklyn,” telling the western readers here’s what’s going on back there.
George Gendron: I think you’re succeeding. And every time I look at an issue, I am reminded of the conversation that took place in the New York magazine newsroom when we were on the verge of launching New West. And suddenly there were these conversations about how the West Coast was, of course, the incubator of the new.
Will Hearst: Yeah.
George Gendron: And here in the East Coast, we got around to those things eventually, but even, you know, Wenner—Wenner launches in San Francisco, but then he feels the compulsion: I’ve got to pick up and move to New York.
Will Hearst: “If you make it here, you can make it anywhere.” He went for the whole Sinatra scenario.
George Gendron: Boy did he.
Will Hearst: And he’s done well for himself.
George Gendron: He has.
Will Hearst: Listen, I grew up on the East Coast, but I always had a feeling that the West was where I belonged. And my grandfather, I read some of his high school things about wanting to go back to the wider open spaces of the West. And I grew up in the East. In the East, we look towards Europe and we’re very connected to that culture. But in the West, we feel like we’re a little bit in the provinces, but we look towards the Pacific and we look towards Mexico.
I just felt there was an open spot to represent the same interests and values, but from that perspective. And that was what Alta wanted to do. And then I made, in every issue, we have a list of our inspiration just below the masthead.
And we started making lists of all the writers from John Muir and Henry Dana and Nathaniel West, Raymond Chandler, Joan Didion. And we suddenly realized, God, there’s a whole cultural depth to people that come out of Western idioms, Western literature. Why don’t we celebrate that? Why don’t we be the champions of that?
Not because it’s better, but just because it’s different, it’s local, It’s exciting. We need to celebrate us. I’m a newspaper guy, so I think of geography as being one of the ways that you can connect to people.
George Gendron: You’re talking about newspapers and geography. But for me, I fell in love with being at New York magazine. It was a gift. But also I fell in love with city magazine publishing. I loved the sense that you walked out of the newsroom and that was your market. There was something about that.
Will Hearst: Yeah, no question. And of course, Clay Felker, and Tom Wolfe, and a bunch of other people recreated that genre and made it much more interesting and much more literary.
George Gendron: Absolutely. I want to do something I probably should have done earlier, but for someone who has never seen or heard of Alta, can you step back? And first of all, where’d the name come from?
Will Hearst: I’m going to tell you a long, shaggy-dog story.
George Gendron: That’s okay.
Will Hearst: I talked to Warren Hinkle many years about an Alta-like publication. He said, “It’s a great idea. We should go buy the name of The Territorial Enterprise which was Mark Twain’s original newspaper.” So we looked into buying The Territorial Enterprise and it turned out to be owned by somebody who didn’t want to sell it, but wasn’t publishing under that name. They were sort of a “dog in the manger.”
And then Warren bought the name The Argonaut for his literary publication. So I was looking around for publications of that era. In the citations, the history of the gold rush in that era, there’s often a citation to a newspaper that was published here in San Francisco called The Alta California. But when it was cited in the sort of habits of bibliographies, It was J. Alta California. So because I’m an idiot, I thought the name of it was The Journal of Alta California.
So I trademarked The Journal of Alta California, which is our subtitle, which is a malapropism in a way. And then John Goecke, our art director, said, “That name is too long. Just shorten it to Alta.” And he showed me some layouts and it seemed like, “Okay, so we’ll go with Alta.”
But our technical legal name is The Journal of Alta California, which is a homage to The Alta California, but we didn’t trademark their name. We created a new name, which was based on misunderstanding the bibliography conventions. Now that’s a really boring story, but that’s the answer to your question.
George Gendron: By the way, I want to come back and add a footnote to what we were talking about just a moment ago. Many of the people that you describe as inspirations for Alta—very well known writers—you include on the masthead. You have a lot of dead people on your masthead. I love that.
Will Hearst: We did that because we were trying to say, “We are not creating something. We are trying to extend a tradition that goes way back.” I was a student of Kevin Starr’s, and he gave a course at Harvard that I didn’t take, but I audited, where he talked about this sort of “canon of the West.” And that the canon of the East would be Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville and that school.
George Gendron: Transcendentalists, yeah.
Will Hearst: Exactly. But in the West if we included John Muir and Raymond Chandler, there was an alternative canon. So I stole that idea from Kevin. And Michael Moore that did the Mountain Gazette showed me that you could do a ski magazine and have literature in it. You didn’t have to have, “How to Wax Your Skis.” Dugald Stermer showed me illustration. Warren Hinkle showed me that you could write incredible headlines.
Warren was a big believer in “to hell with advertising. If you don’t publish something good enough for readers to pay for it, you’ll end up searching for eyeballs.” Mike Sragow was a big promoter that arts and culture was an undercover serious way to reach both younger readers and people with an interest.
I never understood why newspapers kept their sports section, got rid of their book section, because people who read are your readers. And sports was on the internet. I already know the score. I mean, how long did newspapers print stock tables?
George Gendron: I know.
Will Hearst: That tells you something. Yeah, it took a while but the light bulb flickered on in the newspaper industry. But I think magazines are really struggling to realize that they need to change their role.
And I wouldn’t be surprised—I mean streaming has already started to change television, but traditional appointment television is going through the same things that newspapers went through 30 years ago.
George Gendron: I was going to ask you, everybody is shrinking the size, the form factor, their trim size going on cheaper and cheaper paper. You guys don’t. You invest a lot of money in your production.
Will Hearst: Yeah it turns out that the size of the periodical is a cost factor, but it’s not the main factor. The main cost factor in publishing is how often you print, which is why I stand in awe of The New Yorker printing weekly. I mean if you print monthly that’s a little bit easier. And Rolling Stone was biweekly. We decided to do it quarterly because we thought, Oh, we can probably afford to do that.
George Gendron: The whole world is heading toward your frequency.
Will Hearst: Well, I mean that is true. And I go to the Hearst board meetings and listen to people talking about reducing the frequency and I thought, Yeah, what took you so long? The page size and the page count is less of a driver than the frequency. And we may look at the page size.
But I thought, if we’re going to do the West, we have to be able to portray the West. The grandeur, the magnificence, the sort of scale of the West. So we should maybe try to get a paper stock and a color reproduction that’s better than traditional periodicals, at the high end.
We’re still looking at whether maybe we should downsize a little bit. We’ll never go down to like Time magazine format—we can’t do what we do. But we may take it down a little bit because newsstands tend to put us in the back because we’re the size of Interview magazine.
And so we’re looking at various ways to make it easier for people to put it in their briefcase and carry it on the airplane. But we still want to have that boom, that whack, that big, you know, the grandeur of the West. We all have a bigger television than we used to have because it makes a bigger impression. So we want to find the right way to show what the Grand Canyon feels like. We may sort of fine tune that a little bit.
George Gendron: You certainly get it with the combination of the trim size and the design that you have right now. It really stands out.
Will Hearst: People tell me that we’re sort of like the National Geographic—people don’t throw out their Altas. They kind of stack up on the coffee table.
George Gendron: You said somewhere at one point, and I think it was in the context of Alta itself, “You know, I don’t just want to be an owner.” And I think the rest of the quote was about, “I want to make something.” What is your role at Alta?
Will Hearst: I’ve been a publisher. I’ve been an editor. I’ve been a writer. You know, I just felt like, “If I’m going to do this thing, and put my heart and energy into it, I want it to be something where I can have some feeling that it reflects my editorial view." I’ll stand up for the publishing side of the house, but I try to give the editors a lot of freedom.
We have very dynamic meetings. I don’t try to make people do what I want. But I want to be heard. I want to be able to write for the publication, I want to be able to promote writers that I believe in. I’ve worked with people like Terry McDonell, and Jann, and other people and I know I’m maybe not the best editor, but a decent editor.
When I was publisher in San Francisco and Dave Bergen left, I made myself editor and publisher. And Lou Silverstein once told me a story that he went down to see one of The New York Times publications. And the publisher said to him, “I don’t go in the newsroom. I leave that completely to the editors. We have a church and state thing.”
And Lou said, “What kind of a guy owns or publishes a newspaper, and feels uncomfortable talking to the editors or debating whether the coverage was right?” It seemed to Lou like, “You’re not fully committed. You’re looking for some sort of deniability.” I’d rather have my editors be mad at me and debate a point. Church and state is a permeable barrier.
George Gendron: I’m always amazed that editors would often absolutely downright refuse to go on the road and do a road show with clients and important agencies and stuff, instead of viewing that as an opportunity to connect them to the mission of the magazine.
Will Hearst: Yeah. Helen Gurley Brown would be very happy to go to an ad meeting and pitch why you should advertise: “Let me explain to you what we’re doing.”
George Gendron: Everybody’s a salesperson these days. Think about the time that you invest in your media-related life. What percentage of that do you invest in Alta these days? It sounds like you’re almost like a full-time staff member.
Will Hearst: No. I’ve gotten a bit distracted. I think COVID caused us all to go to our cubby holes. And I’ve got a couple of other things that I do and I’ve got grandkids now. I just want to be close enough to go to the editorial meetings. And I’m involved in the theme issues and I talked to John. We do covers together as a team. I go to events and I sit for interviews.
George Gendron: I’m glad you do.
Will Hearst: And once in a while I’ll make an editorial pitch. And I have a bunch of writers that I like and I don’t like to just throw them in. I feel like if I really have a piece that I like, I’ll edit it all the way through and then turn it over to fact checking. Even my own editorials. Blaise edits my editorials. And I bitch and moan like the average writer about, “Why did you change that word? And that should have a semicolon.”
George Gendron: Yeah, that’s healthy.
Will Hearst: It’s healthy from my point of view. I hope it’s healthy from his point of view!
George Gendron: Tell me a little bit, in whichever ways you are comfortable with, about the economic life of Alta. Do you have specific economic or financial goals?
Will Hearst: My colleague Vinod Khosla used to say, “There are some things that are not for profit, but there’s other things that are not for loss.” And my goal is to make Alta an institution. I’d like it to make money. I’d like it to be something that is valuable enough that it’s worth more than what it costs to produce it. But I’m not looking to make a fortune or to sell it. If I got hit by a bus Alta would keep going for a hundred years. That’s my goal.
George Gendron: You took the words right out of my mouth. But what happens if you do get hit by a bus?
Will Hearst: I’d like to set it up in such a way that it is sustainable, like the National Geographic or The Economist or any number of publications.
George Gendron: That sounds very future oriented.
Will Hearst: They just need to be there.
George Gendron: “I’d like to set it up.” You and I are 75.
Will Hearst: Yeah, I know. We’re doing our best. We’re looking for revenue streams and being mindful about our costs. And, advertising has been a question mark. I don’t think we can compete with the big advertising sellers. So I think we’re going to have to make it as a subscription model.
Look at the average publication today, pick any publication with a dart over your shoulder. If you go back 20, 30 years, 80 percent of their revenue was advertising and 20 percent was circulation. It’s almost the opposite today. You’ve got to get the money from the readers and then advertising is an extra. Which is the way it was in the 1900s. When my grandfather was publishing the Examiner, advertising was an extra. It was like found money.
George Gendron: It’s funny because at a certain point early on in the life of Inc., Peter Drucker adopted me and Inc. It was a real gift. One of the things he used to harp on was something you talked about earlier on, which is that if you don’t have a really healthy relationship with your audience, a healthy economic and financial relationship with your audience, sooner or later, it’s going to catch up to you.
Will Hearst: That was Hal Riney’s view. That was Howard Gossage’s view. I have the very strong view that your relationship to something like Alta should be much more like a membership. I like to tell our staff, treat our readers better than a customer. You’re like a member.
When you go to London and you stay at a hotel and they know that you like the theater and they offer you tickets—they’re not offering you free tickets—but you think, I’m always going to come back to this place because I feel like I’m at home here. It’s like a club. And I want our readers to feel like that. I tell the staff that deals with complaints and missed issues, "no more than one phone call."
If you call us and you have a problem, that’s the only phone call you’ll ever make. We’ll resolve that problem while we talk to you. There’s no more “on hold.” There’s no more, “We’ll get back to you.” We have to deliver a service component that is almost as important as the content component.
And we do lots of other things too. You know, we have the California Book Club, which you don’t have to pay anything to attend. And we have some fabulous writers and John Freeman runs that. People have access to writers. That’s a Q & A format. It’s not just a lecture format. So people can interact with our staff.
We like to feel that we’re getting ideas from our readers. It’s not a one way street. It’s a two way street. Alta Live, which Beth Spotswood runs, is basically authors interviews and we try to make the workings of Alta open to the members. If you’re a member of a club, you expect to go to the annual meeting and tell people the drinks cost too much.
We want to have that relationship. We do live events. I remember talking to Steve Jobs or somehow the idea got stuck in my mind that there’s “free” and there’s “feels free.” If you go across the Golden Gate Bridge and you have a fast pass, it’s not free. It’s not free, you have to pay. But it’s so easy. It’s so transparent. It’s better—it’s almost better than free.
Steve Jobs had an idea that people that got free music would be willing to pay for the same music if it was so easy and you were supporting artists. And I want Alta to have that same feeling, that we are very easy to deal with, we’re a service organization.
I think there’s a million books sold every year. And bookstores are not going out of business anymore. I go to a bookstore and I think, I want everybody in the bookstore to be a reader of Alta. They like books. They like reading. They like literature.
They’re willing to buy something or give someone a gift of literature, and understanding, and thoughtfulness, and depth. I want to serve that community and be considered as valuable as —a paperback costs 20 bucks these days! We cost 50 bucks and we give you four issues. It’s a bargain.
George Gendron: I’m a really avid amateur photographer and don’t go crazy on equipment, but I’ll spend to get what I need to do what I want.
Will Hearst: I do that too. It’s an addiction.
George Gendron: It sure is. Not as bad as owning a sailboat, but you can get up there. And I got a request from a B&H Photo in Manhattan.
Will Hearst: Oh, I love those guys.
George Gendron: I love them too.
Will Hearst: Those guys are, they’re my dealer. They’re my pusher.
George Gendron: Yeah. That’s what I said to them. I said to them, “God, I love giving you money.”
Will Hearst: I got to go to the store. Going there is like going to Mecca.
George Gendron: It is. But I gotta tell you one thing you learn as a young kid going in there is you don’t want to go in there and expect to have a leisurely conversation where you get advice about what you’re looking for.
Will Hearst: It’s like a hardware store. Every time I go to a hardware store I buy something I didn’t plan to buy.
George Gendron: Absolutely. I know. We started the conversation with this, but I want to see if we can drill down a little bit because you have such a unique perspective. At Inc. We used to say, look, there’s a population of people who own businesses, and then there’s a market of people who’re like-minded because they’re trying to build something. They’re not just maintaining. And then there’s a community of people who constantly say, “You don’t understand. This isn’t a job. This is my life. I have a compulsion to make things.” And it sounds like you fit into that category.
Will Hearst: I put that on my Facebook page: “I like to make things.” I’m a maker. I like to have my hands on the product. I always thought the best job in a newspaper was the managing editor, because you’re right there in the making. Whereas the front office was too high, the reporters were too low, but to see the whole thing come together.
Jim Bellows taught me something. He said, “When you’re a newspaper reporter, it’s your story. But when you’re the editor, it’s the page, it’s the publication. The canvas is a little bit larger.” And Jann Wenner was very good at that. Roger Black was very good at that. Jim Bellows was very good at that. Frank Bennack, who was our CEO for many years, sensed that we’re delivering a product and an experience. And we’re asking for people’s money. We’re trying to put something in your hands where you feel like, I spent my dollar wisely.
George Gendron: Does it matter to you if the thing that you’re making is tangible?
Will Hearst: I think it does. I think there’s always a perceived value that something tangible is good. I think every business today has to have a web relationship. If you have a tack and saddle shop in Lodi, you have to have a website. Because people need to know when you are open, what your hours are, what’s in the inventory, what’s in stock.
So I don’t think it’s like a binary choice. You have to have a web presence because that’s where you’re meeting your customers. And that’s part of the service component. But I like to think that there’s also a physical part.
And the people that write for Alta, the community of people that write, they do books. They’re looking to leave something behind a little bit of a tangible thing. They don’t want to do just pure ephemera. Maybe that’s a blind spot, but I do feel that there’s some value in that. There’s economic value in that too.
George Gendron: Oh, I agree with that. But there’s also just something that’s intensely personal for people, for some people. Pat and I often talk about the fact that we feel, for us, there’s a kind of psychic gratification that we get that can’t be replaced by anything other than making something tangible. And we built out some phenomenal websites that we’re very proud of and we get satisfaction out of that, but it’s not the same. Just not the same.
Will Hearst: But I think—I would also make the point that it’s not really about print. It’s more about language. We talk to each other in words.
George Gendron: That’s true.
Will Hearst: There’s a certain sort of lush quality of language. I have bought books, or listened to audiobooks. I have the Kindle version, but I’m really interacting with the author and the ideas.
Our art director doesn’t subscribe to any print publications, but he reads everything. Okay, we want to serve you too. We’re not going to insist that you buy a physical. But we’re trying to come in on a channel that has to do with what slow food is to fast food. We want to be something that lasts longer, that has a longer horizon.
George Gendron: It’s funny. I was thinking about just this phenomenon you just described today. I just finished reading Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner. And I have the book in hardcover. I have it on my Kindle. I have it on Audible where she’s reading her own book, which I would recommend authors usually don’t do, but I wanted to hear it. I actually have printed out maybe 15 different reviews of the book. I don’t know—whenever I’m with a friend or something, the first question I ask is, have you read Creation Lake? I want to talk about it.
Will Hearst: You know, she was in our California Book Club too. She’s a regular.
George Gendron: Yeah, she’s extraordinary. She’s a force of nature. Yeah. So a young journalist comes to you and says, “I want to do something about such and such a topic. I’ve been watching what you guys are doing and I’m thinking of doing a quarterly.” What advice do you give them? Where do you tell ’em to go?
Will Hearst: When I was working for Outside magazine with Terry and Jann we said, “If this thing will work, if some kid shows up that we’ve never heard of on our doorstep and says, ‘I want to write for you.’ And it’s, ‘Who are you? Have you done anything?’”
And I think as publishers, we have to think there’s this thing emerging out of the ground, every day, of new talent. And we need to be listening to what’s going on there. We have to do that. That’s just one of the tests. We love old people but we have to be ready to be told we’re wrong.
George Gendron: Yeah, I think that’s true and speaking of non-old people. I want to go back to the question of students for a second. Somebody recently said, you know the day and age when young journalists are coming up because they’re filled with a sense of vocation and passion.
Will Hearst: Yeah, it’s true!
George Gendron: They said, “Oh that’s over.”
Will Hearst: No, that’s not over.
George Gendron: No, it’s not over. And in fact, somebody interesting about these people —and it connects to what you were saying earlier Will —is that when you ask them, What do they want to do? They don’t talk about, “Oh, I want to get a job at The New Yorker.” Right? They all talk about, they’re completely honest with themselves about the fact they’re going to have to make stuff. They’re gonna have to you know, it’s kind of like in a way you’ve made a job for yourself at Alta.
Will Hearst: There is a bumper crop of people with that feeling and that inspiration. The thing that’s different about them is that they’re much more multi-talented than they used to be. Much more open to different forms and formats.
George Gendron: Yeah. That’s true.
Will Hearst: They’re not just, I want to be a writer for The New Yorker, I want to do a screenplay. I want to do a startup. I want to write some poetry. I want to produce a play. They’re much more wide-angle than my generation. Mike Sragow wanted to be a movie critic. That’s not the bumper crop. They want to do it all.
Sometimes I talk to young people, I talked to this charming young woman and I said we want her to write for us. And I think she was saying to me, “Are you trying to pick me up?”
And I said, “No, I’m not. I’m really an enthusiast for your talent. This is not a #MeToo thing. I think you are a great talent and I’m trying to acquire you so that I can say that you once wrote for Alta.”
George Gendron: Yeah. Evidently, she doesn’t hear that a lot, does she?
Will Hearst: I understand that the younger generation has had enough of the older generation.
George Gendron: Yeah, I think so too.
Will Hearst: I really want to be a, I want to be a discoverer of talent. I think our readership is a little bit older and a little bit more settled and a little bit more committed to what we’re interested in. But there is this constant shockwave of talent that’s coming into the world.
And that happened to me when Clay Felker gave me a break, when Jann Wenner gave me a break, when Frank Bennack gave me a break. But if it hadn’t been for those people taking a chance on me before I thought I was ready, things would’ve happened differently. So I wanted to offer that to the next generation.
George Gendron: Are you surprised that there isn’t more support for young aspiring media people these days?
Will Hearst: I don’t know the answer to that question. It feels to me like the people that I see that come into the Hearst Journalism Program, they will definitely find a job. I mean, I see their parents wringing their hands and saying, “Will they find employment?” But they do. They don’t fall by the wayside.
George Gendron: I’m really interested in people’s character and to what extent they attribute it to their upbringing or are they hardwired, nature versus nurture. And so you have this reputation, evidently well deserved, for just not caring a whole lot about wealth and about the trappings of wealth. I remember—again, this is Arthur Lubow’s piece—he’s quoting somebody who I think was a roommate of yours at Harvard, saying, “William Randolph Hearst III, you hear the name you meet the man, and then you go to his room at Harvard. And it’s a bare room with a mattress on the floor and a light bulb hanging from a cord.”
Will Hearst: Yeah, I don’t know.
George Gendron: Most people talk about the car that you drive. So I want to know, where did that come from?
Will Hearst: It comes from a couple of places. One is, I have seen friends of mine who had fabulous success, and I see that they often become surrounded by a cocoon of people that are trying to do them favors. And they become more and more privileged, more and more entitled. And they end up being prisoners of their wealth and fame.
And I thought, I don’t want to be that person. My dad, when I was a kid, used to say, “They want to talk to the publisher of the paper. They don’t want to talk to you. And when you’re not the publisher, they don’t want to talk to you anymore.”
So it made me aware that you have to be alert to what’s going on here. I remember hanging out with Bobby Shriver and people would come up to him and say, “Oh, I was a great fan of your uncle. I admire the Kennedys.” And for some people, they would recoil from this and they would feel like, Oh, how do I get rid of this fan?
But Bobby was remarkably open and said, “Oh, thank you very much. And what’s your name?” And I realized that if you’re fortunate enough to have a kind of a privileged life, don’t take yourself too seriously. And when I meet famous people, I do exactly the same thing. I’m in awe. So I don’t know. I just feel like it’s a sand trap if you’re not careful. So better to be a little bit low key than to try and think like you deserve all this. You don’t deserve it.
George Gendron: Maybe this is a crazy question. But when I think about William Randolph Hearst III, how much of that character that we’re talking about is absolutely intentional? How much of it is, “this is just who I am?”
Will Hearst: You’ll have to decide that for yourself. Like Gay Talese covering Frank Sinatra—he’s gonna let us know what he thinks. I guess I’m very consistent. If I’ve been the same person since college as I am at 75, that’s probably an inner thing.
I do remember Miles Davis saying, “If you’re the same person at age 50 that you were at age 20, you’ve just wasted 30 fucking years.” So I think we should grow and develop, but I think some things are innate.
George Gendron: You’ve got to be aware of how rare that is these days.
Will Hearst: I’m aware of how badly people—I don’t want to be in that box of ‘entitlement.’
George Gendron: No, I know. I know. So I have to ask you this. What haven’t we talked about in the last hour or so that’s really on your mind.
Will Hearst: Well maybe I haven’t done a good enough job promoting my product and telling you what we’re doing. I just want people to feel that it’s more like a membership than a publication, that we offer you a publication the same with the National Geographic, you’re a member, but you get the magazine.
So you’re a member of Alta because you like what we’re doing, you’re interested, and we’ll try and give you a very good experience. Some of it free, some of it pay, some of it swag, some of it personal appearances, but we would rather celebrate what we’re about than try to change the publishing world. We’re trying to do something relatively modest and do it very well.
George Gendron: Do you think it’s possible for Alta, given that vision that you have for it, to be economically self-sustaining?
Will Hearst: Absolutely. Absolutely. If we’re not doing something interesting enough to qualify for your support, we shouldn’t exist.
George Gendron: Do you have models that you look at?
Will Hearst: I look at The Economist, I look at The New York Review. I look at a variety of institutions, some of which are on the border of philanthropic and some of which are a little bit more certain to succeed. I’m inspired by what people like Steve Jobs have done because of the energy that they put into creating something excellent.
I probably won’t achieve that kind of scale, but if the people that go into bookstores and who read and who follow the news, if some percentage of them—and there’s millions of them, I don’t need hundreds of millions. I need a million. I need a couple of hundred thousand people.
And we’re a big country, we’re a big world. I need to just let these people know that we’re here. That’s my business goal. We have a very low cancellation rate, very low churn, which is what you want in a subscription business.
So our goal is to tell people what we’re doing and give them a proposition. And I think when I pitch you, you generically, your first question, Is this for real? Is this full of shit? But if I can get you to take a chance on us, I think you’ll find that we’re delivering pretty much what we promised. So I just got to get in front of more people and tell them what we’re doing. We probably should advertise more.
George Gendron: There you go. I have a vivid memory of Martha Stewart getting up. I forget whether it was an ASME event and basically excoriating the audience because she said, “Most of you don’t even advertise.” You don’t advertise your own products in a way.
Will Hearst: There’s three things that you need to have a capitalist success. You have to have the ability for a business to fail, you have to have a willingness to risk some capital, and you have to have a marketplace where you can tell people what you’re doing. Grandfather used to say, “If you do something good and you don’t advertise, it’s like winking at a girl in the dark.” You got to tell people you’re there.
George Gendron: Yeah, and you have to figure out how to do it in a way so you cut through the clutter. First of all, thank you again for the time you’ve spent.
Will Hearst: Thank you, George.
George Gendron: We’re big fans of Alta and of the work that you’ve done.
Will Hearst: Good! Spread the word.
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