Advance Newspapers history

Financial success eluded the first generation, the suspender business of the father having failed in 1905.

By 1916 Newhouse, at the age of 21, was earning $30,000 a year for his myriad responsibilities with Lazarus & Brenner, as well as with the newspaper, where he now worked for a percentage of the profits.

The Staten Island Advance proved to be the foundation of the publishing empire Newhouse established in the 1920s.

As far back as the 1924 statement of Advance's purpose, Newhouse had a declared intention of publishing magazines.

Many newspaper stands were at first reluctant to carry the Advance, but Newhouse increased circulation by adopting a Brooklyn newspaper's home-delivery system, and by 1928 he had made enough to buy out his two partners in the company for $198,000.

The first of these acquisitions, in 1935, was a 51 percent share in the Newark Ledger of Newark, New Jersey.

Newhouse repeated this merger strategy when he bought the Newark Star-Eagle and merged it with the Newark Ledger to form the Newark Star-Ledger in 1939.

With the purchase of the Portland Oregonian in 1950, he paid a record $5.6 million.

The publisher of Advance's Birmingham, Alabama, paper in 1962 was an unabashed racist, while Newhouse himself was staunchly liberal.

When the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications was opened in 1964, President Lyndon Johnson gave the dedication speech.

Advance bought 49 percent of a massive paper mill in Catawba, South Carolina, in 1970.

In 1971 Advance bought both the Bayonne Times, the paper at which Newhouse had started his career, and the Newark Evening News.

The first was in 1980, when they paid $70 million to RCA Corporation for Random House publishing, the leading general-interest book publisher at the time, thus acquiring the third type of media listed in Advance's statement of purpose.

Given that Newhouse operated, according to the November 27, 1989 issue of Barron's, "not only one of the most powerful, but one of the most secretive family businesses in America," the public curiosity was understandable.

In 1993 the company offered $500 million to back QVC's bid to purchase Paramount, though QVC later lost their bid to Viacom.

In 1994 Advance acquired 25 percent of the computer and multimedia magazine Wired.

By 1996 Forbes magazine listed Si and Donald Newhouse as sharing a fortune worth at least $9 billion.