Newhouse Family

Newhouse family, family that built the second largest publishing empire in the United States in the second half of the 20th century.

The family’s fortunes began with Samuel Irving Newhouse (b. May 24, 1895, New York, N.Y., U.S.—d. Aug. 29, 1979, New York City), who was born Solomon Neuhaus and was later known as S.I. Newhouse. He was working as a clerk for Judge Herman Lazarus in Bayonne, N.J., when Lazarus took over a failing newspaper, the Bayonne Times. Lazarus asked Newhouse, then 17, to take care of the paper. Newhouse cut costs while working for more advertising and wider circulation, and within one year the newspaper was making a profit.

By 1916, at age 21, Newhouse was earning an annual salary of $30,000. In the early 1920s he began purchasing floundering newspapers and using the same techniques to make them profitable that had worked on the Bayonne Times. He bought the Staten Island Advance in 1922, and in 1924 he incorporated the Staten Island Advance Company, which became the basis of his publishing empire. With the profits he made from the Advance, he bought other small, undistinguished, unprofitable newspapers in New York and New Jersey and turned them around. In 1949 he renamed his company Advance Publications Inc.

Newhouse became a major force in American newspaper publishing in the 1950s with his purchase of the Portland Oregonian (1950), the St. Louis Globe-Democrat (1955), and several papers in Southern cities. In 1959 he acquired Condé Nast Publications, which printed such magazines as Vogue, Glamour, and House & Garden. With his purchase (1962) of the Times-Picayune Publishing Company, which printed both of the major newspapers in New Orleans, Newhouse owned more papers than any other American publisher. In 1967 he bought the Cleveland Plain Dealer for $54,000,000, and in 1976 he paid the record-breaking sum of $305,000,000 for Booth Newspapers, which published eight Michigan newspapers and Parade magazine. Though he paid close attention to his newspapers’ profitability, Newhouse did not impose any editorial policies on his papers; local editors were free to express their own political views.

By the time of his death in 1979, Newhouse owned the third largest newspaper chain in the United States, with a total circulation of more than 3,000,000. Besides 31 newspapers, he also owned 7 magazines, 5 radio stations, 6 television stations, and 15 cable television systems. His philanthropies included a $15,000,000 donation to Syracuse University to establish the Newhouse School of Public Communications.

Upon his death the business was managed by two sons, Samuel I. Newhouse, Jr. (1927–2017), and Donald E. Newhouse (b. 1930), who greatly expanded the family holdings. Under their leadership, Advance Publications purchased Random House (1980) and several other book publishers and became one of the largest American magazine publishers with such titles as The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Gentleman’s Quarterly, Vogue, Mademoiselle (folded 2001), Glamour, Brides, Self, and Gourmet (folded 2009).