San Antonio Express-News

• 1. Introduction

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  The San Antonio Express-News has been telling the story of one Texas city since 1865, making it older than the telephone, older than the light bulb, and older than the modern game of baseball. It started as a weekly tabloid on the frontier, outlasted every rival newspaper that dared to challenge it, and today stands as the third largest newspaper in the state of Texas. How did a scrappy weekly sheet survive two world wars, a depression, the rise of television, and the digital age? And what does it mean that the paper's current home is a building named after the competitor it eventually helped destroy?

• 2. A City of Many Voices

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  San Antonio already had newspapers in multiple languages when the Express first appeared in 1865. That multilingual press was a sign of the city's complexity, but it was also a sign of fragmentation. None of those other publications survived. One by one, they folded, leaving the Express as the sole paper serving the city.

  The Express itself came close to the same fate. Its early years were marked by repeated leadership changes that nearly ended the paper before it had a chance to find its footing. A new company, the Express Printing Company, stepped in and took control in 1875, giving the paper the stability it had lacked. By 1878, the Express had settled into its identity as a daily morning newspaper, the format it would keep for over a century.

• 3. The Rival That Grew

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  In January 1881, A. W. Gifford and J. P. Newcomb launched a challenger called the Evening Light. Newcomb was not a stranger to the Express; he had been an early investor in the paper. The Evening Light positioned itself as an afternoon publication, filling the hours the morning Express did not cover.

  At first, Express editors chose to ignore the newcomer entirely. That calculation proved costly. The Light kept growing, and by the turn of the 20th century it had built real readership. In 1906, the paper changed hands, selling to E. B. Chandler. In 1909 it absorbed the San Antonio Gazette, briefly running under the name the Light and Gazette. By 1911, the veteran correspondents Harrison L. Beach and Charles S. Diehl had taken over. Diehl was a founder of the AP wire service, a credential that gave the paper both reach and credibility. Under Beach and Diehl, daily circulation climbed from 11,000 to 25,000 copies. They also published the first full stock market reports ever to appear in a San Antonio paper, and the Light took on a liberal-Democratic political character that set it apart from the more conservative Express.

• 4. Hearst Enters the Picture

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  William Randolph Hearst bought the Light in 1924 and remade it according to his own editorial policies. The acquisition brought national resources and a recognizable brand into the San Antonio market. By 1945, the Light's circulation had grown to approximately 70,000 copies.

  Meanwhile, the Express Publishing Company had not stood still. Back in 1918, Express ownership had launched its own afternoon paper, the San Antonio Evening News, creating an in-house rivalry that produced genuine tension between the two staffs. Some News workers went so far as to relabel a new office building the News-Express building. The company also branched into radio, founding WOAI in 1922, one of the city's first radio stations. Later decades brought two more radio acquisitions and a television station that Express Publishing renamed KENS-TV, with call letters meant to stand for K-Express News Station.

• 5. Rupert Murdoch's Gamble

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  By 1973, the Light had beaten both the Express and the News in circulation, and a new owner arrived who was willing to bet on a different strategy. Rupert Murdoch, an Australian native running News Corp, bought both the Express and the News from the Harte-Hanks newspaper group, which had acquired Express Publishing in the 1960s.

  Murdoch reshaped the two papers into complementary competitors. He kept the Express in its original conservative format while reformatting the News as a tabloid-style product. The Light now faced two stylistically different rivals at the same time, while struggling with the rising costs that come with running an afternoon circulation. The pressure mounted steadily. By September 1984, the Express and the News merged into the San Antonio Express-News. Afternoon service wound down gradually as the merged paper grew its morning circulation. The Express-News expanded beyond Bexar County, and it became San Antonio's leading newspaper.

• 6. The Light Goes Dark

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  News Corp began looking to exit the San Antonio market in 1992, having diversified heavily into movies and television. The Hearst Corporation, still running the Light after nearly seven decades of ownership, faced a choice. It could sell the Light and watch the Express-News fall to another owner, or it could trade the Light for the Express-News and keep its foothold in the city.

  Hearst chose the latter. The Light went up for sale. No buyer appeared. On the 28th of January 1993, the San Antonio Light published its final edition, ending a rivalry that had begun in January 1881. Hearst took ownership of the Express-News, consolidating the city's newspaper market under one roof. Decades later, in 2019, the Express-News sold its downtown headquarters building. The disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic delayed the planned relocation, keeping staff working remotely. When the paper finally moved in 2022, it landed on the top two floors of the Light Building, the very structure named after the newspaper Hearst had once owned and ultimately closed.

• 7. Scale and Structure Today

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  In 2016, the Express-News reported a daily circulation of nearly 100,000 copies, a figure that placed it third among all newspapers in Texas. Hearst owns both ExpressNews.com and MYSanAntonio.com, operating them from shared office space in San Antonio while keeping them as distinct editorial organizations. MYSanAntonio.com, also known as MySA, runs its own separate newsroom and website and is editorially independent of the Express-News.

  The paper also maintains an office in Austin, extending its reach beyond the city where it was founded. The hybrid work model the Express-News adopted after the pandemic kept the organization flexible as it settled into its new home in the Light Building, where staff began transitioning back to in-person work after the move.