Hearst Corp., the owner of The San Francisco Examiner, said Friday that it was buying The San Francisco Chronicle, increasing the likelihood that San Francisco will join the growing list of one-newspaper cities.
Hearst said that it would try to sell The Examiner, William Randolph Hearst's first newspaper in his legendary empire, but that if no buyers emerged it would combine the two papers.A morning newspaper with a circulation of about 475,000 readers, The Chronicle is owned by the family descended from the deYoung brothers, who founded the paper in 1865.
The Examiner, an afternoon paper, has been owned by the Hearst family since the 1880s, and for a number of decades it has borne the slogan "Monarch of the Dailies." But the Examiner's circulation is just over 114,000.
The sale marks the end of an increasingly unhappy era for both publications, which have been run under under a joint operating agreement since 1965.
While neither side would disclose the amount of the transaction, industry analysts estimated the price at approximately $500 million. The deal also includes SF Gate, the San Francisco Bay Area's leading Web site.
According to antitrust guidelines established by the Justice Department, which state that a single corporation can own no more than one major newspaper per city, Hearst will have to make a good-faith effort to sell the Examiner. If the newspaper is not sold, which newspaper-industry analysts predicted would be the most likely outcome, the staff of the Examiner will be combined with that of The Chronicle.
In a noontime meeting with staff members at The Chronicle, Hearst chief executive Frank Bennack and and Chronicle Publishing Co. president John Sias told employees that their jobs would be maintained under the deal. Sias told staff members that Nan Tucker McEvoy, a deYoung descendant who owns a third of the Chronicle family stock, was "devastated" by the sale.
Still up for sale are other assets of Chronicle Publishing.
San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown said, "Cities are better served by having more newspapers rather than fewer newspapers. We would hope that a buyer would be found for the afternoon Examiner."
But some newspaper analysts are already predicting that in the end, only one paper will survive.