R.I.P.: Media Baron S.I. Newhouse Jr.

Samuel Irving Newhouse Jr., who as the owner of The New Yorker, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Architectural Digest and other magazines wielded vast influence over American culture, fashion and social taste, died on Sunday at his home in Manhattan.

He was 89 according to The NYTimes.

Newhouse, known as Si, and his younger brother, Donald, inherited an impressive publishing empire from their father, Samuel I. (“Sam”) Newhouse, and built it into one of the largest privately held fortunes in the United States, with estimates of the family wealth running over $12 billion at the turn of the 21st century. While Donald led the more profitable newspaper and cable television operations, Si took charge of the more glamorous magazine division.

S.I. Newhouse

Much of that glamour was created under Si Newhouse’s direction. Though himself a shy man often painfully awkward in public, Mr. Newhouse hired some of the most charismatic magazine editors of the late 20th century, among them Tina Brown and Graydon Carter at Vanity Fair and Diana Vreeland and Anna Wintour at Vogue, and encouraged them to behave like the celebrities they extolled in his publications.

It helped that he rewarded them with salaries, expense accounts, clothing allowances and housing loans that were the envy of their peers. Newhouse editors also enjoyed spectacularly generous budgets at their magazines, which often ran deep in the red for years before turning profits.

The Chicago Tribune reports Newhouse was chairman of Advance Publications Inc., which Forbes magazine in 2017 ranked as the 40th-largest private U.S. company, with an estimated $8 billion in revenue and 25,000 employees. In four decades at the helm of its magazine unit, Conde Nast Publications, he created new titles, entered markets around the globe and helped reengineer magazines as thick, glossy periodicals in which paid advertisements seem to complement rather than interrupt the articles.

His father, Samuel Sr., died in 1979 as a self-made media chieftain. He owned 31 newspapers with a total circulation of more than 3 million, plus the Sunday supplement Parade, seven magazines including Vogue and Glamour, radio stations and cable-television systems. In 1971, Syracuse University's journalism school, acknowledging its main benefactor, was renamed the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.

The largest source of Newhouse's wealth was derived from the $10.4 billion sale of cable operator Bright House Networks LLC to Charter Communications Inc. in May 2016. Another sizable portion came from his stake in Discovery Communications Inc., which owns Discovery Channel, TLC and Animal Planet.

Newhouse gave $15 million to Syracuse University.

Samuel Irving Newhouse Jr. was born Nov. 8, 1927, in New York.