San Francisco

Newspapers

The 1848 Gold Rush turned San Francisco into California's largest city virtually overnight. By 1849, the city had its first newspaper, the Alta California. By 1850 four more dailies arose. Newspapers came and went with seeming abandon: the city's roster of dailies rose to 8 in January 1851, dropped to 2 in 1852, and climbed to 12 by December 1853.

On January 16, 1865, three brothers from the de Young family, Charles, Michael Harry and Gustavus, founded The Daily Dramatic Chronicle, with a borrowed $20 gold piece, according to legend. The paper's first big scoop came three months later, when Michael walked to the telegraph office one morning and learned President Lincoln had been assassinated. The paper ran an “extra” edition, unleashing the ire of street mobs attacking the paper's competitors that had been critical of Lincoln. In 1868, the de Youngs started a subscription service and the paper was relaunched as The Daily Morning Chronicle, then later renamed the San Francisco Chronicle.

In 1870, San Francisco was the country's tenth-largest city. By that time, Charles de Young was running sensational, factually suspect stories. In April 1880, the publisher himself made news. The paper was printing embarrassing material about mayoral candidate and de Young rival Isaac Smith Kalloch, a Baptist minister. Kalloch, in turn, leveled embarrassing charges against de Young's mother. De Young responded by shooting Kalloch, who survived the attack and won election as mayor, serving from 1879 to 1881. During the middle of the mayor's term, his son, Isaac Milton Kalloch, shot and killed Charles. Michael de Young took over the paper.

The history of the Chronicle's fiercest competitor is no less unruly. In 1880, Senator George Hearst accepted the 15-year-old San Francisco Examiner as payment for a gambling debt. The Examiner would later spawn a nationwide Hearst publishing empire that promoted war in the Caribbean and inspired the term yellow journalism.

Both papers also put major literary figures to work. Mark Twain wrote articles in exchange for office space at the Chronicle. The paper, in turn, defended Huckleberry Finn against bans in local libraries. Bret Harte, a clerk at the San Francisco Mint, also wrote for the Chronicle. Neither man [Page 1240]was given a byline. In 1888, the Examiner was the first to print the baseball poem “Casey at the Bat,” by Ernest Lawrence Thayer. Ambrose Bierce and Jack London also claimed Examiner bylines. But the publication took shape only after 1887, when William Randolph Hearst, 23, begged his father to take over the “miserable little sheet.” In 1889, the son labeled the Examiner “The Monarch of the Dailies”—a moniker the paper still displays. Hearst began to acquire other papers, including the New York Journal.

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