END OF AN ERA AT CONDE NAST
Media giant S.I. Newhouse dies at 89
Billionaire media mogul and magazine impresario S.I. Newhouse Jr. — who shaped American pop culture helming titles such as Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Vogue — died Sunday at the age of 89.
He passed in his Manhattan home, family members confirmed.
Newhouse and his brother, Donald, inherited a vast media empire from their father, Sam Newhouse, who started building his domain with the purchase of the Staten Island Advance in 1922, later buying publisher Condé Nast in 1959.
Newhouse Jr., known as “Si,” was given the magazines to run and transformed them into the glitzy arbiters of popular culture.
While brother Donald ran the newspaper empire as the president of the Advance, “Si became the greater of equals as the chairman of Advance and Condé Nast,” according to Thomas Maier, who authored the 1994 biography “Newhouse: All the Glitter, Power, and Glory of America’s Richest Media Empire and the Secretive Man Behind It.”
“Today, we lost a giant,” Condé Nast President and CEO Bob Sauerberg said. “Si embodied creativity, curiosity and a commitment to excellence unlike any other, and he will forever be remembered as the man who built the most influential media empire in the world.
“We are honored to work in this incredible business he created, and will strive to emulate his courage and wisdom.”
Under Newhouse’s watch, Condé Nast embodied the glamour many of its products peddled — hosting lavish parties and sparing no expense to fly in European dresses and even corralling live animals for photo shoots.
“Si was the generous benefactor at the high-water mark of magazine publishing in the 1990s, with highly paid writers and editors who became almost as famous as the people they covered,” Maier said.
The editors and writers whom he helped turn into bona-fide brands had no shortage of words for their erstwhile leader. He brought in buzz-obsessed Britons Anna Wintour and Tina Brown as editors, while abruptly firing staffers who fell from his favor. Grace Mirabella learned she was being axed as editor-in-chief of Vogue in June 1988 after her husband saw it on TV.
“Si Newhouse wasn’t incidentally in the magazine business,” said New Yorker Editor-in-Chief David Remnick. “He loved magazines, he loved everything about them — from the conception of new publications to the beauty and rigor of the latest issue — and that passion, that commitment to excellence, free expression and imagination radiated in every direction.”
Graydon Carter, editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, added his thoughts.
“With Si’s passing, the big chapters in the history of magazines —as written by men like Si and Henry Luce — will have come to an end,” he said. “He was a oneoff in an age of carbon copies.”
Over the years Newhouse and brother Donald expanded the empire to include cable television as well as a bullpen of culture-defining broadsheets and glossies.
Donald told NBC’s “Today” show in September that Si was suffering from frontotemporal dementia and “had lost the ability to understand speech.”
Newhouse is survived by his wife, Victoria, brother Donald and two children, Sam Newhouse and Pamela Mensch.