[6] The company was founded by William Randolph Hearst, a newspaper owner most well known for use of yellow journalism.

[7] In 1880, George Hearst, mining entrepreneur and U.S. senator, bought the San Francisco Daily Examiner.

[11][12] The company entered the book publishing business in 1913 with the formation of Hearst's International Library.

[19] Despite some financial troubles, Hearst began extending its reach in 1921, purchasing the Detroit Times, The Boston Record, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

He continued his buying spree into the mid-1920s, purchasing the Baltimore News (1923), the San Antonio Light (1924), the Albany Times Union (1924),[20] and The Milwaukee Sentinel (1924).

Following Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany, the Nazis received positive press coverage by Hearst presses and paid ten times the standard subscription rate for the INS wire service belonging to Hearst.

[24] William Randolph Hearst personally instructed his reporters in Germany to only give positive coverage to Hitler and the Nazis, and fired journalists who refused to write stories favourable of German fascism.

[24] During this time, high ranking Nazis were given space to write articles in Hearst press newspapers, including Hermann Göring and Alfred Rosenberg.

Afternoon papers were a profitable business in pre-television days, often outselling their morning counterparts featuring stock market information in early editions, while later editions were heavy on sporting news with results of baseball games and horse races.

After the war, however, both television news and suburbs experienced explosive growth; thus, evening papers were more affected than those published in the morning, whose circulation remained stable while their afternoon counterparts' sales plummeted.

The earnings of Hearst's three morning papers, the San Francisco Examiner, the Los Angeles Examiner, and The Milwaukee Sentinel, supported the company's money-losing afternoon publications such as the Los Angeles Herald-Express, the New York Journal-American, and the Chicago American.

It reached the first agreement with the DeYoung family, proprietors of the afternoon San Francisco Chronicle, which began to produce a joint Sunday edition with the Examiner.

The effects of the strike accelerated the pace of the company's demise, with the Herald Examiner ceasing publication November 2, 1989.

[35] On July 31, 1996, Hearst and the Cisneros Group of Companies of Venezuela announced its plans to launch Locomotion, a Latin American animation cable television channel.

[44] In 2011, Hearst absorbed more than 100 magazine titles from the Lagardère Group for more than $700 million and became a challenger of Time Inc ahead of Condé Nast.

On February 20, 2014, Hearst Magazines International appointed Gary Ellis to the new position, Chief Digital Officer.

[47][48] On January 23, 2017, Hearst announced that it had acquired the business operations of The Pioneer Group from fourth-generation family owners Jack and John Batdorff.

The Pioneer Group was a Michigan-based communications network that circulates print and digital news to local communities across the state.

The company paid $150,000 in cash plus an amount equal to 90% of the magazine's accounts receivable[59] In November 2023, Hearst acquired all print and digital operations owned by RJ Media Group, including the Record-Journal, seven weekly newspapers and a digital advertising agency.

[87] As of 2017, the trustees are:[88] The trust dissolves when all family members alive at the time of Hearst's death in August 1951 have died.