Those who think newspapers are a dying business should spend a little time with Jeff Johnson.
While the industry is hunkering down and working through digital disruption, Johnson is buying and growing newspapers, including major dailies in Texas.
A former publisher of the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle, Johnson is now senior vice president of Hearst and president of its newspaper group.
Hearst started in 1887 with a San Francisco newspaper and grew into a New York-based conglomerate with sales of $13.5 billion last year. It owns TV stations, cable networks, magazines, and information services for the medical and financial industries.
In recent years, Hearst bought more newspapers, building a collection of around 30 dailies and 50 weeklies. Notably, it created clusters in Connecticut and Texas.
That’s led to job losses as production operations consolidated. But unlike other big chains, Hearst is investing in relatively big newsrooms and new digital products to extend their journalism and reach new audiences.
That contrast was highlighted last year when Alden Global Capital, a newspaper operator known for deeply cutting costs, launched a bidding war after Hearst moved to buy The Dallas Morning News. Hearst won, paying around $80 million, after the family-owned paper declined Alden’s higher offer.
Hearst already owned the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News, and bought the Austin American-Statesman from Gannett earlier in 2025.
That’s paying off, with Hearst Newspapers posting gains in 2025 after a tougher 2024. Hearst expects the acquisitions and “continued strong growth in digital subscriptions” to drive more growth in 2026, according to an annual update last month by Hearst CEO Steve Swartz.
There is history between Hearst and The Seattle Times. They were bitter rivals until Hearst chose to cut its losses at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 2009. It laid off most of the staff and ended print production.
But that’s water under the bridge, and I wanted to know why Hearst sees (other) newspapers as a good investment and how it expects them to succeed in a hypercompetitive digital era.
Johnson had plenty to say about this so I’ll just share edited excerpts of our conversation:
Dudley: Why is Hearst acquiring more newspapers?
Johnson: Well, as you know, it’s a unique mission and I think Hearst very much believes in that mission — it’s where it all started for Hearst. It has been and will remain an important part of the company.
Q: Hearst is also trying to do more with newspapers, especially online.
A: All consumer media businesses continue to go through a transformation, right? I mean the external forces, the changes in how consumers get information. All consumer media has to face that issue of change — television, magazines, newspapers, cable. This is not unique to us. I think we’ve just been doing it the longest. So I think that one thing that newspapers have a strength in is the ability to evolve. While we haven’t gotten it perfect, we do a lot of things to continue to meet people and give them content that matters to them.
Q: Such as?
A: We like to look at it in several buckets. You’ve got breaking news and what’s happening today that you need to know about. We’ve got important things to cover, investigative reporting, things that the world needs to know about — what happened, what’s going on with the election, things that are important. The third bucket is, how do we help people live their lives better? You might historically call that service journalism but it’s utility journalism. If we help people understand what’s going on with BART delays in San Francisco and give them a heat map that shows how different times of day things are impacted, that’s not going to win a Pulitzer but that helps people navigate their lives. It’s helping them understand how well their high school did in terms of application to the University of California system.
Q: That was a smart project by your San Francisco Chronicle.
A: That also opens up the number of people who will sample us, because I think we’ve hit a lot of people who care about hard news, care about breaking news, care about what’s important in society and going on in government. But we want and need to have more people value us enough to pay for our content.
Q: Your CEO mentioned a product helping people in Texas appeal tax assessments.
A: Somebody can not care anything about hard news but care a lot about getting that. So I think we have to continue to deliver on all those (buckets). And obviously, from a journalist standpoint, the first two are very, very important that we deliver on for society but it’s also an important part of our business. That third one gives us an opportunity to play in some lanes that we’ve always been in a little bit, but maybe go a little bigger.
Q: That’s great.
A: This business is all about, do people value what we give them enough to take out a subscription, and then obviously we have the advertising component. But listen, all consumer media is going through this, and we just have to keep doubling down on what’s working. Another part of this is having as many direct relationships with readers, whether they’re occasional readers who subscribe to a free newsletter or people paying us, and not relying on Google search or Google Discover to drive audience.
Q: Tell me about the clustering.
A: In Connecticut, we had several newspapers that were really struggling to exist on their own. We knew, because of support we already had in Connecticut, that we could bring those folks in, add a lot of statewide and regional coverage that they didn’t have, and make them contribute positively to the Connecticut newspaper group. In Texas, there were some benefits of having other newspapers in Texas, but we bought the papers because we felt they were well run newspapers in good markets. That Texas connection was a plus but was not the driver of it.
Q: You’re still committed to print?
A: We work very hard to take care of our print subscribers. We have a very strong commitment to the highest service level to those folks. We have a maniacal focus on that service and it shows: We were up in print consumer revenue last year over 2024 and there aren’t many newspapers that had an increase in that.
Q: Wow.
A: But we’re not naive about print. We know the volume is going to continue to go down. People prefer the digital format but we plan to continue to give them that print experience as long as they want it.
Q: What are you going to do with the P-I?
A: I’m talking to the main competitor in Seattle right now so I think I should be smart about what I say on this, other than the brand has a great history. We’re looking at other ways we can serve the community in a way that’s distinct. And being kind of a smaller operation, it gives us a little more flexibility in thinking about what might we do, especially in a world where some of these tools can make you very productive with a smaller presence.
