Many and/or most readers of The Staten Island Advance and its online presence, SILive.com, have no doubt thought for years it was a small family-run newspaper that perhaps was part of a larger chain of local-town newspapers like the Tribune Company.
Well that’s partially true — but it’s not the Tribune Company, The Staten Island Advance is actually the original Flag Ship property of a now MUCH LARGER concern called Advance Publications –which owns:
- Conde Nast — which produces the following printed magazines:
And the following digital-only magazines:
-
- Glamour
- Pitchfork
- Teen Vogue
- Self
- and others
- The following newspapers in other cities:
- NJ.com — which includes:
- The Star-Ledger
- The Times (of Trenton)
- The Jersey Journal
- South Jersey Times
- Advance Media NY, which includes:
- Syracuse. com
- NY Cannabis Insider
- Central NY Magazine
- Advance Ohio — which includes:
- The Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio)
- Alabama Media Group — which includes:
- Al.com and the Lede
- The Birmingham News
- The Huntsvillie Times
- Press-Register of Mobile, Alabama
- MLive Media Group — which includes:
- MLive.com
- The Ann Arbor News
- Bay City Times (Bay City, Michigan)
- The Flint Journal
- Grand Rapids Press
- Kalamazoo Gazette
- Saginaw News
- and others
- Oregonian Media Group — which includes:
- The Oregonian (out of Portland, Oregon)
- PA Media Group — which includes:
- The Patriot-News (out of Harrisburg, PA)
- NJ.com — which includes:
- American City Business Journals — based in Charlotte, North Carolina, which produces business news for 44 cities or markets — from Albany NY to Wichita Kansas, with each market’s edition named for that market. It also produces:
- Stage Entertainment
- Pop Inc.
- 30 percent stake in Redditt ($RDDT) — the public company that at this writing has a market cap of $30 B.
- 13 percent stake in Charter Communications ($CHTR) — the public company that at this writing has a market cap of $38 B.
- 4 percent stake in Warner Brothers ($WBD) — which at this writing has a market cap of $43 B.
Even without the stock holdings, Advance Publications is estimated to be a $2.4 billion organization employing 12,000 people.
Still a Family Business
Advance Publications is privately owned by the families of Donald Newhouse and Samuel Irving Newhouse Jr., the sons of company founder Samuel Irving Newhouse Sr (often called SI Newhouse — for which a Staten Island Ferry was named).
Headquartered on Staten Island — & World Trade Center
The Advance Publications empire is essentially run out of the headquarters of the Staten Island Advance — which is headquartered at 1441 South Avenue, Staten Island — in the new office building built by Richard and Lois Nicotra in their corporate park.
The Staten Island Advance was originally headquartered on Castleton Avenue in West Brighton, Staten Island. In 1960, the Advance moved its headquarters to a new primary print facility at 950 West Fingerboard Road. In July 2020, the company moved to the new building at 1441 South Avenue in Nicotra Corporate Park.
Conde Nast, its subsidiary, has its headquarters in 1 World Trade Center.
Named After the Staten Island Advance
The company is named after the Staten Island Advance, the first newspaper owned by the Newhouse family.
SI Advance Founded by John Crawford & James Kennedy
But the Staten Island Advance was not founded by SI Newhouse — it was founded by printer John J. Crawford and businessman James C. Kennedy in 1886, and initially known as the Richmond County Advance.
Samuel I. Newhouse Purchased SI Advance
In 1908, at age 13, Samuel Irving Newhouse Sr. began working as an office assistant to Hyman Lazarus, an attorney, owner of the Bayonne Times, and a leader of New Jersey’s Democratic Party machine.
By 1916, when Newhouse was 21, Lazarus rewarded Samuel Newhouse with a salary of around $30,000 per year, and 25 percent ownership of the Bayonne Times, for loyal service.
In 1922, Newhouse and Lazarus purchased the Staten Island Advance in one of the first in a series of newspapers Lazarus acquired.
When Lazarus died in 1924, Newhouse bought the Lazarus family share of Staten Island Advance stock.
SI Advance Gained Footing through Newstands
Throughout the 1920s, the Newhouse family loaned money to Henry Garfinkle, which enabled him to open newsstands that increased sales of the newspaper — first at the St. George Ferry Terminal on Staten Island — then later throughout Manhattan and at LaGuardia Airport in Queens, Newark Airport in Newark, New Jersey, and at the Port Authority Bus Terminal.
Garfinkle’s newsstand at Port Authority was the world’s largest and most lucrative newsstand.
Newhouse Expands in 1930’s thru 1950’s
The Newhouse family continued to expand by acquiring other newspapers.
- In the 1930s — during the Depression — they still were doing well enough to acquire the Long Island Press in Jamaica, Queens, the Long Island Star, the North Shore Journal, the Nassau Journal, the Newark Ledger, and the Newark Star.
- Throughout the 1940s they acquired newspapers in Syracuse, NY; Jersey City, New Jersey; and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
- In the 1950s, they acquired newspapers in St. Louis, Oregon, and Alabama.
Newhouse Acquires Vogue and Conde Nast
- By the late 1950’s, the Newhouse family’s wealth approached $200 million, enabling it to purchase Vogue and other Conde Nast magazines.
Competitive Advantage: Working with the Mob?
In his book Newspaperman: S.I. Newhouse and the Business Of News, author Richard Meeker writes about suspicions that the Newhouse family’s source of wealth involved the Mob:
“Newspaper analysts were so suspicious of the source of Newhouse’s funds that they discussed openly the possibility that he was laundering money…
Some went so far as to suggest that his newspaper operations had been used as a front for the notorious Reinfeld mob, a group of booze-peddling hoodlums whose boss had made millions during prohibition.”
Competitive Advantage: Creative Tax Reductions
It is documented that the Newhouse family hired accountants and lawyers who used creative accounting to find unique ways to reduce the amount of taxes the organization paid to the IRS — providing a competitive advantage.
Richard Meeker in his book Newspaperman: S.I. Newhouse and the Business Of News, states:
“They played every tax game there was”, recalled one man who once served as publisher for several Newhouse newspapers. That meant that every cost that could conceivably be written off as a business deduction was, that assets were depreciated as rapidly as possible, and that new acquisitions were “written up” as high as the law allowed … Where Newhouse developed a special advantage was in the way he avoided paying taxes for the profits that remained to him after the payment of corporate taxes …
Thanks to an ingenious device created by his accountant, Louis Glickman, and implemented by his attorney, Charles Goldman, Newhouse was able to avoid paying taxes on accumulated earnings and, thus, to multiply the value of his earnings several times. Doing so involved the creation of a special corporate structure for the various newspapers …
Because the Goldman–Glickman construct kept the various enterprises separate—for tax purposes at least—each could claim the right to its own surplus. Taken together, the accumulation that resulted was many times what the IRS would have allowed had Newhouse simply treated all of his operations as a single corporation.”
Staten Island Advance Today
So many Staten Islanders of a certain era delivered the Staten Island Advance as their first job. Today, the paper is still printed, and can be delivered to your home — but most people on Staten Island go to SILive.com — which gates a lot of content (but not all) behind a subscription firewall.
Conde Nast Today
Unlike newspapers, magazines continue to be printed and distributed en masse to kiosks at train stations and airports, and in bookstores such as Barnes & Noble.
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