Herald Examiner to Shut Down : Media: Thursday’s edition will be the last for the publication founded in 1903 by William Randolph Hearst.

The Los Angeles Herald Examiner, once the nation’s largest afternoon newspaper but recently just a scrappy shell of its former self, announced today it will cease publication Thursday.

Robert Danzig, vice president and general manager of Herald Newspapers, made the announcement at an emotional meeting in the newsroom this afternoon.

The Herald Examiner, founded by William Randolph Hearst in 1903 as the Los Angeles Examiner, was put up for sale by the Hearst Corp. earlier this summer.

Hearst cited “intense pressure” from The Los Angeles Times, the city’s dominant daily with five times the Herald’s daily circulation.

The Herald, which in recent years had switched to morning publication, also had to wrestle with increasingly successful suburban papers like the Orange County Register, based in Santa Ana, and the Los Angeles Daily News, based in the San Fernando Valley.

Herald reporter Laura Bleiberg was covering the Beverly Hills teachers strike vote today when she got the news. She broke out in tears.

“I’m shocked. It’s definitely the best place I’ve worked. I’ve worked at lots of other places that have folded. When everyone was running around the office (at the Herald), freaking out, I kept telling them to calm down.”

Bleiberg, who joined the newspaper about a year ago, also said she had just started looking for another job, but wasn’t sure what she would do since she had not expected the end to come before the end of the year.

In its dying days, the Herald covered local politics aggressively, breaking a number of stories on embattled Mayor Tom Bradley.

While the Herald provided little staff-produced coverage of Washington or international affairs, the paper’s entertainment coverage, sports columnists and local reporting was highly regarded.

The Times has a daily circulation of 1,118,649 while the Herald, which had a circulation of 729,000 in 1967, slumped to 238,392 daily, according to figures compiled by the Audit Bureau of Circulations.