Company Overview

 

In 1911, 16-year-old Samuel I. (Si) Newhouse took the helm of the Bayonne Times and turned around the beleaguered New Jersey newspaper. He then bought the Staten Island Advance and used the profits to expand his publishing holdings. From there, the company grew to include the high-profile Condé Nast Publications, which he bought in 1959. The private company passed from Newhouse to his sons upon his death in 1979. In the 1980s, Advance brought back Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. After some restructuring and a return to a stronger editorial focus, the company added Knapp Publications (Architectural Digest) and American City Business Journals (comprising 41 weekly papers) to its stable of properties in the ’90s. In 1999, Advance partnered with E.W. Scripps, Hearst, Stephens Media Group, and MediaNews Group to buy AdOne, an online classified advertising network that was renamed PowerOne Media. That same year, the company bought Fairchild Publications (holding trade journals like Women’s Wear Daily). The year following, Advance launched online extensions of its most popular magazines. In 2001 and 2002, it bought four magazines including Golf Digest and Modern Bride. Advance now ranks as the number-two magazine publisher in the United States and is a leading online publisher as well. It also owns more than two dozen daily papers including The Cleveland Plain-Dealer, and has stakes in Time Warner (33 percent) and Discovery Communications (25 percent).