Advance Publications

Family owned and operated, Advance Publications Inc. is a multibillion dollar international communications empire that publishes newspapers, magazines, books, and electronic media. It is the second-largest publishing concern in the United States. The founder, Samuel I. Newhouse, built his success on hard work, innovative business methods, and the help of Newhouse family members, who took over the company after the founder's death and continued his idiosyncratic organizational system. Solomon Neuhaus--later called Samuel I. Newhouse and finally just S.I. Newhouse--was born in 1895 in New York City. He was the oldest of eight children born to recent immigrants from Eastern Europe. Financial success eluded the first generation, the suspender business of the father having failed in 1905. After graduating in 1908 from eighth grade in Bayonne, New Jersey, Newhouse briefly attended a business school in New York City. He carried bundles of newspapers across the Hudson River to earn money for the fare to and from business school. This was Newhouse's first newspaper job. Newhouse earned no money the first month he was employed by Judge Hyman Lazarus, a city magistrate who operated a law office, Lazarus & Brenner, in Bayonne. After showing his worth as an office assistant that first month, Newhouse was given $2.00 a week. Starting a steady rise in the firm, Newhouse became the accountant, real estate manager, and general troubleshooter for Lazarus. The judge had acquired 51 percent of the Bayonne Times in payment of a debt. It seemed at first to be a losing proposition, but Lazarus hoped to stem the losses until he could sell the newspaper, which he had moved into the same building as the law firm. To that end Lazarus gave Newhouse responsibility for the business aspect of the Times . Newhouse concentrated on increasing both advertising revenues and subscriptions, and the paper showed a profit within a year. 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. This same year he finished his study of law at New Jersey College and passed the bar examination in New Jersey. After losing his first and only trial, a debt-collection case, Newhouse paid his client the disputed amount out of his own pocket and retired from trial law. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Newhouse, as the sole source of support of his family, was exempt from conscription and concentrated on building up the Bayonne Times, which enjoyed increased circulation as people sought to learn the latest war news. Newhouse devoted much of his free time to learning about the newspaper business, which impressed him as a feasible way to make his fortune. His model was William Randolph Hearst. Despite Newhouse's lofty ambitions, his first step in this direction was less than successful. With borrowed money from his family, along with his own savings, Newhouse went into partnership with Lazarus to buy The Fitchburg Daily News Company of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, for $15,000. Newhouse took pains to make the new paper a going concern, but faced with antagonism directed toward him as both an outsider and a Jew, he decided within a year to sell the property to Frank L. Hoyt, publisher of the competing Fitchburg Sentinel . Persuading Hoyt of the benefits inherent in owning a newspaper monopoly, Newhouse was able to turn a profit on even this first, relatively unsuccessful newspaper deal. By 1922 Newhouse was ready for another acquisition and with Lazarus bought 51 percent of the stock of The Staten Island Advance for $98,000. In 1923 the circulation of the Advance rose 50 percent, and the number of pages had doubled with additional advertising. In November of that year the Advance 's masthead listed S.I. Newhouse as publisher. The Staten Island Advance proved to be the foundation of the publishing empire Newhouse esta