The Los Angeles Herald Examiner was a major Los Angeles daily newspaper, published in the afternoon from Monday to Friday and in the morning on Saturdays and Sundays. It was part of the Hearst syndicate. It was formed when the afternoon Herald-Express and the morning Los Angeles Examiner, both of which were published there since the turn of the 20th century, merged in 1962.

For a few years after the merger, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner had the largest afternoon-newspaper circulation in the US. It published its last edition on November 2, 1989.

William Randolph Hearst founded the Los Angeles Examiner in 1903, in order to assist his campaign for the presidential nomination on the Democratic ticket, complement his San Francisco Examiner, and provide a union-friendly answer to the Los Angeles Times. At its peak in 1960, the Examiner had a circulation of 381,037. It attracted the top newspapermen and women of the day. The Examiner flourished in the 1940s under the leadership of the city editor James H. Richardson, who led his reporters to emphasize crime and Hollywood scandal coverage.

The Los Angeles Herald Examiner was the result of a merger with the Los Angeles Herald-Express in 1962. In turn, the Herald-Express had been the result of a merger between the Los Angeles Evening Express and Evening Herald in 1931. The Herald-Express was also Hearst-owned and excelled in tabloid journalism under City Editor Agness Underwood, a veteran crime reporter for the Los Angeles Record before moving to the Herald-Express first as a reporter and later its city editor. With the merger in 1962, the newspaper became an afternoon-only newspaper.

The Examiner, while founded as a pro-labor newspaper, shifted to a hard-right stance by the 1930s, much like the rest of the Hearst chain. It was pro-law enforcement and was vehemently anti-Japanese during World War II. Its editorials openly praised the mass deportation of Mexicans, including U.S. citizens, in the early 1930s, and was hostile to liberal movements and labor strikes during the Depression. Its coverage of the Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles during World War II also was particularly harsh on the Mexican-American community.

Much of its conservative rhetoric was minimized when Richardson retired in 1957. Underwood remained on the staff following the merger in an upper management position, leaving the day-to-day operations to younger editors.

The Hearst Corporation decided to make the new Herald Examiner an afternoon paper, leaving the morning field to the Los Angeles Times (which at the same time had ceased publication of the evening Mirror). However, readers' tastes and demographics were changing. Afternoon newspaper readership was declining as television news became more prominent, while expanding suburbs made it harder to distribute papers during the rush hour. The fact that sports leagues were playing more night games also meant that evening newspapers were no longer able to print full results. Indeed, by the 1950s Hearst's morning papers such as the Examiner had their income siphoned off merely to support the chain's faltering afternoon publications. Following the merger between the Herald-Express and Examiner, readership of the morning Los Angeles Times soared to 757,000 weekday readers and more than 1 million on Sunday. The Herald Examiner's circulation dropped from a high of 730,000 in the mid-1960s to 350,000 in 1977. By the time it closed in 1989 its circulation was 238,000.

On December 15, 1967, Herald Examiner employees began a strike that lasted almost a decade and resulted in at least $15 million in losses. At the time of the labor strike, the paper's circulation was about 721,000 daily and it had 2,000 employees. The strike ended in March 1977, with circulation having dropped to about 350,000 and the number of employees to 700.