Newhouse School of Communications
History:
The S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University is one of the largest and most respected professional communications schools in the nation. Its faculty includes industry leaders and internationally known scholars and researchers. Its degree programs are consistently ranked amongst the best in the U.S. and include advertising, broadcast journalism, magazine, newspaper, public relations, television-radio-film and visual and interactive communications.
Samuel I. Newhouse
At the age of 13, Samuel I. Newhouse was an office boy for a lawyer in Bayonne, N.J. At 15, he was the lawyer’s office manager and accountant. At 16, he was publisher of a small daily newspaper the lawyer had acquired in payment of a debt. At 21, he was half owner of the paper and had himself become a lawyer. By the age of 30, he was sole owner of the Staten Island Advance and on his way to becoming a world media giant.
Newhouse died in 1979 at the age of 84. The company he founded, Advance Publications, continues to thrive, and today owns newspapers in 26 American cities as well as Condé Nast Publications, Parade Publications, Fairchild Publications, American City Business Journals, the Golf Digest Companies, Newhouse News Service, Religion News Service and Bright House Networks, which serves 2.4 million cable system customers in Florida, California, Michigan, Indiana and Alabama. The company also owns Advance Internet, which operates more than 100 web sites serving its print publications and cable systems.
Advance newspapers include the Star Ledger of Newark, N.J.; the Plain Dealer of Cleveland, Ohio; the Oregonian, of Portland, Oregon; and the Post-Standard of Syracuse, N.Y. Magazines, published in six countries, include Vogue, Glamour, W, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, GQ, Gourmet, House and Garden and Parade, the Sunday newspaper supplement, which is the largest circulation magazine in the United States.
Newhouse was justly proud of his accomplishments, but proudest that he created a new kind of national publishing group in the United States, the first to allow editors and publishers to make their own editorial and news coverage decisions. He called it local autonomy and it was copied, over the years, by the other national publishing groups. In an editorial following his death, The New York Times said, “S.I. Newhouse demonstrated that editorial autonomy in newspaper chains could be both good business and good journalism. In an era of growing consolidation in newspaper ownership, that lesson is a legacy.”
Newhouse left control of Advance Publications to his two sons, S.I. Newhouse Jr. and Donald Newhouse, who have continued the policy of local autonomy as they have expanded both the newspaper and magazine branches of the private family business. The third and fourth generations of the Newhouse family are now actively involved in the management of the business as well. They are S.I. Newhouse III and S.I. Newhouse IV, the son and grandson of S.I. Newhouse Jr., and Steven and Michael Newhouse, the sons of Donald Newhouse.
