Under William Randolph Hearst's will, a common board of 13 trustees--five family members and eight outsiders--administers the Hearst Foundation, the William Randolph Hearst Foundation, and the trust that owns (and selects the 18-member board of) the Hearst Corporation. The foundations shared ownership until tax law changed to prevent this. The present trustees are:
Harvey L. Lipton, lawyer and former vice president and Secretary of the Corporation
Gilbert C. Maurer, succeeded Deems as head of Hearst Magazines, then preceded Ganzi as executive vice president and chief operating officer under Bennack, now a consultant
Mark F. Miller, former executive vice president of Hearst Magazines
David J. Barrett, president and chief executive officer of Hearst-Argyle Television, Inc.
The trust dissolves when all family members alive at the time of Hearst's death in August 1951 have died. Actuarial tables have put this date at 2042 or 2043.[1]
Interests in an additional 43 daily and 72 non-daily newspapers owned by MediaNews Group, which include the Denver Post and Salt Lake Tribune MediaNews 10-Q
In November 2006, Reilly's attorney presented to U.S. District Judge Susan Illston a letter from Hearst senior vice president James Asher to MediaNews President Jody Lodovic that said the two companies agreed to "offer national advertising and internet advertising sales for their San Francisco Bay area newspapers on a joint basis, and to consolidate the San Francisco Bay Area distribution networks of such newspapers ..." Illston, suggesting she had been misled by the companies when they said they had not been collaborating, issued a 14-page ruling[3] forbidding Hearst and MediaNews from working together on national advertising sales or distribution.
On December 21, 2006, the San Francisco Bay Guardian and nonprofit Media Alliance filed suit to make the details of Reilly's lawsuit -- and MediaNews and the Chronicle's response -- public.[4] As a result of the filing, many documents in the case were voluntarily disclosed by the defendants. The judge allowed redacted versions of two more documents to be released. She kept 17 others under seal. One of the documents unsealed was the deposition of Hearst's Asher, who says that as of September 2006, his company had recorded cumulative losses of $330 million on its investment in the Chronicle,[5] which it acquired in mid-2000. He said Hearst proposed selling the Chronicle to MediaNews, but MediaNews didn't offer enough money. Asher also said Hearst and MediaNews have discussed working together for years. Although the trial was scheduled to start Monday, April 30, 2007 in U.S. District Court in San Francisco,[6] the parties announced on April 25, 2007 that a settlement had been reached.[7]
References
^ David Nasaw, The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst (Mariner Books, 2001).