Father knows best

Brandweek, April 26, 1999 by Verne Gay

Verne Gay is a staff writer at Newsday.

Donald Newhouse is running the family newspaper business the same way his father did. Only he's respected for it.

The early morning sun was still well tucked beneath the Manhattan skyline when the phone rang in Donald Newhouse's office at the Newark Star-Ledger recently. He answered.

Was this a good time-the caller wondered-to chat about the nation's thirdlargest group of newspapers (total circ: 2.8 million) and the editorial gains they have made over the last decade? Would he like to answer a few questions about the post-modern management style so famously embraced by his father, Sam (S.I.) Newhouse, who died in 1979? Could he address some of the challenges facing the far-flung empire over which he has direct control?

Yes, Newbouse answered politely It was a good time to chat. But not about that. There was never a good time to chat about that. There never has been a good time. There never will be.

And so, Donald Newhouse went back to work. Given its vast size and influence, the Newbouse chain remains enigmatic: With the possible exception of a handful of close associates, few people know bow Donald (and his equally press-allergic brother, Si) spends his long days. That's the way it was with S.I. That's the way it is with Donald and Si. And-yes-that's the way it is with Mark, Jonathan, Michael, Steve and the dozen or so other nephews, nieces, sons and daughters who have chosen to work in the company that bears their name.

Given the fact that Donald Newhouse employs hundreds of reporters at monopoly newspapers in some of the largest cities in the country-New Orleans; Portland, Ore.; Newark; and Cleveland-one could interpret such reticence as hypocrisy. Or churlishness.

But that assessment would not be entirely accurate. Donald Newhouse doesn't talk about Advance Publications (which comprises Conde Nast and the newspaper group) because it is his family's business, say observers. Families-at least ones who are proprietors of one of the world's great private fortunes-don't talk about themselves to reporters-or to anyone else for that matter. This near-century-long cloak of silence is the Newhouse omerta.

"I think the boys [Donald and Si]," says one industry leader, "either genetically or intellectually inherited the style of the father, which was very, very private."

The irony is that Donald Newhouse finally has much to talk about. Once derided as some of the worst newspapers to ever roll off a printing press, the Newhouse dailies are no longer the spittoon of the industry They aren't bad, and in a couple of cases, they are good-quite good. The Portland Oregonian just won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. The New Orleans Times-Picayune (which won two Pulitzers in 1997) was a finalist for 1998. The papers in Syracuse (Post-Standard and Herald-Journal) and Birmingham (the News, which did groundbreaking work on the Gulf War Syndrome) are award winners, too. The once lowly Jersey Journal in Jersey City, N.J., has earned a measure of respect from peers, and the paper for which the entire company is named-the Staten Island Advance-led a charge for succession from New York City and was taken seriously in the process. The flagship Star-Ledger has improved so markedly under former New York Daily News editor Jim Willse that anyone who grew up with the paper would hardly reco gnize it today

Plenty to talk about, indeed. In a 1962 cover story on one of the nation's most powerful newspapers barons, Time magazine effectively damned Sam Newhouse's hands-off approach to his papers by observing. "If he has not debased the quality of U.S. journalism, he has not notably improved it either." Tom Maier, a Newsday investigative reporter, would write in his widely respected biography of Si more than 30 years later, "That the Newhouses have fostered a culture of apathetic reporting, cozy political relationships, and a moral ambiguity that permeates their history as stewards of the public trust." It is noteworthy that just five years after that charge was leveled, few would agree the statement still holds entirely true.

What has happened, most observers agree, was not by design or fiat. Donald did not waive a wand from his perch in Newark demanding that the papers earn respect. Nor (lid publishers from the 23 dailies attend a leafy corporate retreat to learn the efficacies of modern editorial management.

In keeping with Sam's belief that the newspapers should operate unencumbered by corporate oversight or interference, these publishers do not even know each other. When some papers-particularly the Times-Picayune and the Star-Ledger-- began to shed the vestiges of their sorry past, a few people even suspected that Donald's son. Steven (who runs the Jersey Journal and the company's various Web sites) had led the charge to quality, Presumably, the basis for this assumption is that Steve graduated from Yale, while his father and uncle never finished college. What does Steve have to say about his influence? "I choose not to give general interviews about our publications."