The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
Media titan Samuel ‘Si’ Newhouse is dead at 89
NEW YORK » S.I. Newhouse Jr., the low-profile billionaire media mogul who ran the parent company of some of the nation’s most prestigious magazines, died Sunday. He was 89.
Newhouse’s death was confirmed by his family, who said he died at his New York home.
The chairman of Conde Nast since 1975, Si Newhouse, as he was known, bought and remade The New Yorker and Details magazines and revived Vanity Fair. Other magazines in the Conde Nast stable included Vogue, Wired, Glamour, W, GQ, and Self.
“Si Newhouse really loved quality content,” said his nephew Steven Newhouse, who is the chairman of Advance Publications. “He was passionate about journalism and he supported journalists and editors and he set an example of caring about the right things in media, which is great stories, great design, great magazines, great websites.”
Before selling the Random House book publishing empire, he spotted a magazine profile about a rising young real estate mogul and was inspired to commission the first book of a future president, Donald Trump’s “The Art of the Deal.”
Newhouse brought in buzz-obsessed Britons Anna Wintour and Tina Brown as editors, who became celebrities in their own right, while abruptly firing staffers who fell from his graces. Grace Mirabella learned she was being axed as editor-in-chief of Vogue in June 1988 when her husband saw it on TV.
Conde Nast under Newhouse was famously extravagant, paying editors huge salaries, throwing lavish parties and rarely sticking to budgets — if budgets existed at all. Its expense accounts were legendary, with dresses flown from Paris to New York on the Concorde and elephants brought in to menace models at fashion shoots.
“There’s no place on Earth like this,” Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter told New York magazine in 2009. “There’s no place where you’re given the resources you need to do what you want to do and also given complete freedom to do it.”
Conde Nast focused on glossy titles that helped set the nation’s tastes, reached millions of aspirational readers and appealed to upscale advertisers.
“Our magazines represent a certain tone and audience,” Newhouse told The New York Times in a rare interview in 1988.
He said the company that his father bought in 1959 for $5 million was following in the tradition of its founder, Conde Montrose Nast.
“It was that initial orientation of Conde Nast,” Newhouse said. “He invented the form of the specialized magazine. He didn’t want a large audience. He wanted one in which everyone counted.”
But the company has struggled in recent years with the advertising meltdown. Since 2007 it has closed Gourmet, Cookie, Modern Bride, Elegant Bride, House & Garden, Jane, Men’s Vogue, Portfolio, Domino and Golf for Women. The ambitious business magazine Portfolio shuttered in April 2009 just two years after its launch, burning through an estimated $100 million.
Forbes said in March 2009 that the downturn had sliced Newhouse’s fortune in half, but his estimated net worth of $4 billion still left him the world’s 132nd richest man.
Newhouse and his brother, Donald, owned Staten Island, New York,based Advance Publications Inc., the owner of Conde Nast, daily newspapers in about 20 cities and a cable television company.
Unlike other media moguls who seemed obsessed with building a media empire to make money, influence opinion or bask in the spotlight, Newhouse seemed to have no grand plan. He rarely gave interviews, had no discernible political views and imposed few cost controls on his magazines.
Associates said he simply enjoyed the magazine business and rubbing elbows with the cultural elite.
“He loves magazines, meaning the whole and all of it, the variety of things published, the business details, the visions and actions and personalities of his editors, the problems, the problem-solving, the ink and paper ... the all of it,” New Yorker editor David Remnick told New York magazine in 2009.
“He likes the buzz, there’s no question,” Wintour told The Times in 2008. “If you have lunch with a celebrity or political figure, he’s thrilled to hear about it.”
A short, mild-mannered man who usually arrived at his 22nd floor office around 5 a.m. in gray slacks and beat-up loafers, Newhouse was often described as shy and socially awkward.
That notoriously made for messy dismissals. Louis Gropp learned he was being fired as editor of House & Garden in 1987 while vacationing in California. Newhouse called and asked if he’d been reading Women’s Wear Daily while on holiday.
When Gropp said no, Newhouse got to the point.
“There have been a lot of stories in WWD that Anna Wintour is going to become the editor of House & Garden,” his boss told him, according to Carol Felsenthal’s 1998 book, “Citizen Newhouse: Portrait Of A Media Merchant.”
“Well, is that true?” Gropp asked. “Yes,” Newhouse replied. Val Weaver was let go as head of Self magazine in 1988 when Newhouse knocked on her door and asked, “Would you mind if we made a change in editors in chief?”, according to a 1995 biography of Newhouse by Thomas Maier.
Other editors Newhouse unceremoniously let go included Diana Vreeland from Vogue, Anthea Disney from Self, William Shawn and Robert Gottlief from The New Yorker, and Andre Shiffrin from Random House imprint Pantheon.