william randall hurst wanted his newspapers to be fun to read. this is not a new idea but typical of hurst it was an idea that he seized and pushed to the limit. >>> a hurst newspaper was essentially three things, headline, comics and sports. hurst would latch on to a single story and blast it into the public with relentless glee. for days, the headlines would breathlessly glare out the day's latest. if the news wasn't interesting enough on its own merit then a hurst reporter would make it so. for example, without knowing yet exactly why a preacher ran off with his 18-year-old ward, a hurst reporter wrote that the man was written by a love microbe that strangely enough seemed to exist only in the long island neighborhood where the preacher lived. the preacher wound up killing himself. there is the story of the hurst reporter who sought a photo of a dead girl. the reporter proceeded to set a fire in the back of the house. when the mother fled, he sneaked into the house and stole the dead girl's picture. do we have here an intrepid reporter or a hea