End of the Herald Examiner

Since the turn of the century the Herald Examiner and its predecessors have been part of the life of Los Angeles. It has been both an actor in the events of this region and a mirror of them, holding up to its reading public a reflection of the news and the issues of the day as it saw them.

When it was founded in 1903 by the most flamboyant of the American press lords, William Randolph Hearst, the Los Angeles Examiner joined his New York Journal and San Francisco Examiner as the third star in a constellation of journalistic enterprises that for decades exerted a powerful pull on America’s popular culture. Like a good beer, the journalism they served up was brewed for working-class tastes, a frothy but filling blend of Progressive-era reforms and the entertaining sensationalism of yellow journalism.

Perhaps the best individual example of that Hearst style was Aggie Underwood, the late Herald city editor who, as a crime reporter, once unblushingly began a story on the murder of three children with this sentence: “What little Jeanette Marjorie Stephens loved in life--a ruffled blue organdie dress--will be her shroud in death.”

Today, the public’s appetite for such reportage probably is satisfied by lesser television talk shows. The paper lost and never regained the influence or the readers it had under its founder and his immediate successors. In recent years its readers and its income dwindled. Offered for sale, it found no buyers, and so its owners have closed its doors.

It is not merely the sharp whiff of mortality gusting up Broadway that brings an empathic shudder to us at The Times. The Herald Examiner’s serious role as an aggressive commentator on issues of local importance will not be easily filled. Its absence will place an even greater responsibility on The Times to be fair, accurate and complete in its reporting and to be attentive to the views and concerns of all segments of this increasingly diverse community.