In 1984, Guittar joined Gannett as president of "USA Today". He was later hired by Hearst corporation in 1986 as group vice president overseeing its nationwide publications and supervised a short-lived joint venture between Hearst and Russian newspaper Izvestia. In 1995, he succeeded William Randolph Hearst III as editor and publisher of the San Francisco Examiner and retired from the company in 1998. His last journalism piece, was an article published in the Examiner about the 1999 John F. Kennedy Jr. plane crash, in which he drew on his own experiences as a licensed pilot.