He entered into a circulation war with the New York World, the newspaper run by his former mentor Joseph Pulitzer and from whom he stole the cartoonists George McManus and Richard F. Outcault.

Many believed that as part of this, aside from any nationalistic sentiment, Hearst may have helped to initiate the Spanish–American War of 1898 with lurid exposes of Spanish atrocities against insurgents and foreign journalists.

By the mid-1940s, the newspaper's Sunday comics included Bringing Up Father, Blondie, a full-page Prince Valiant, Flash Gordon, The Little King, Buz Sawyer, Feg Murray's Seein' Stars, Tim Tyler's Luck, Gene Ahern's Room and Board and The Squirrel Cage, The Phantom, Jungle Jim, Tillie the Toiler, Little Annie Rooney, Little Iodine, Bob Green's The Lone Ranger, Believe It or Not!, Uncle Remus, Dinglehoofer und His Dog [fr], Donald Duck, Tippie, Right Around Home, Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, and The Katzenjammer Kids.

The domination of television news became evident starting with the four-day period of JFK's assassination, Jack Ruby's shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald and both men's funerals.

Journal-American editors, apparently sensing that psychotherapy and rock music were starting to enter the consciousness of both blue-collar and white-collar New Yorkers, enlisted Dr. Joyce Brothers to write front-page articles in February 1964 analyzing the Beatles.

in the Bahamas, columnist Phyllis Battelle interviewed them for articles that ran on the Journal-American front page and in other Hearst papers, including the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, for four consecutive days, from April 25 to 28, 1965.

During every visit that the Beatles made to New York in 1964 and 1965, including their appearances at Shea Stadium, various Journal-American columnists and reporters devoted a lot of space to them.

[12] Throughout 1964 and 1965, Dorothy Kilgallen's Voice of Broadway column, which ran Sunday through Friday, often reported short news items about trendy young rock groups and performers such as The Rolling Stones, The Animals, The Dave Clark Five, Mary Wells and Sam Cooke.

Surgeon General Luther Terry that "a blue ribbon committee of scientists and doctors," in the words of reporter Jack Pickering, had concluded that cigarette smoking was dangerous.

According to its publisher, publication of the combined New York World Journal Tribune was delayed for several months after the April 1966 expiration of its three components because of difficulty reaching an agreement with manual laborers who were needed to operate the press.

Other afternoon and evening newspapers that expired following the rise of network news in the 1960s donated their clipping files and many darkroom prints of published photographs to libraries.

The Hearst Corporation decided to donate the "basic back-copy morgue" of the Journal-American, according to a book about Dorothy Kilgallen,[15] plus darkroom prints and negatives, according to other sources, to the University of Texas at Austin.

On rare occasions, researchers have digitally scanned Journal-American pages, articles or columns, such as Dorothy Kilgallen's, from microfilm and shared them on social media and other websites.

[17] The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, also at the University of Texas at Austin, has the Journal-American morgue of clippings, numbering approximately nine million.

Two scoops of The Journal was the printing of the confession of Herman Webster Mudghett aka Dr. H. H. Holmes a serial killer of Chicago in 1896 and the Jacob Smith order of 1902