Hearst Corp. is a privately held American media conglomerate.

Hearst owns 15 daily newspapers, led by the Houston Chronicle and San Francisco Chronicle. It also owns numerous magazines, including Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Seventeen, and O. Hearst also owns broadcasting and digital properties, including the search marketing firm iCrossing.

Hearst shut down the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s print edition in 2009, turning it into an online-only news organization.

In early 2009, Hearst began rethinking its digital strategy, a process that initially involved plans to charge for online news at some of its papers, though as of May 2012, none of its papers charged for online access. Part of this strategy includes an emphasis on tablet applications; David Carey, president of Hearst Magazines, said in March 2011 that these platforms could be 25 to 30 percent of his magazines’ circulation. Hearst reported 600,000 paid digital magazine subscriptions, many of them digital-only, in early 2012.

As part of that focus, Hearst developed an e-reader called Skiff, which was scheduled to launch sometime in 2010 but which was sold to News Corp. in 2010. In May 2011, Hearst became one of the first major publishers to reach an agreement with Apple to sell in-app magazine subscriptions.