Staten Island Advance

The "Staten Island Advance" is a daily newspaper published in the borough of Staten Island in New York City. It is the only daily newspaper published in the borough and the largest by circulation, covering news of local and community interest in the borough, including borough politics. As of April 25, 2007, Monday-Friday circulation was down 3.9% from the previous year, to 59,461. Sunday dropped 4.6% to 73,203. [Jennifer Saba, "FAS-FAX Preview: Circ Numbers To Take Another Big Hit", Editor and Publisher, April 25, 2007 12:30 PM ET, [http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003576374] ] It is currently owned by the Advance/Newhouse Group.

History

The "Advance" was first published in 1886 by the printer John J. Crawford and the businessman James C. Kennedy as the "Richmond County Advance". The name was later changed to the "Daily Advance" before it acquired its current name. At the time of its initial publication, it had nine competitors for the daily newspaper business in Staten Island. It surpassed its early competitors, with its circulation growing from 4500 in 1910 to over 80,000 by the mid 1990s.

In 1908, Samuel Newhouse I started working as an office-boy, bookkeeper and rent-collector in Jersey Democratic machine politician, "Bayonne Times" newspaper owner and Judge Hyman Lazarus's law office. And by the time Samuel Newhouse I was 21 in 1916, he was earning around $30,000 per year and had been given 25 percent ownership of the "Bayonne Times" by his boss, Judge Lazarus, for his loyal service.

By 1922, Newhouse had saved up enough money to purchase the "Staten Island Advance" in partnership with Judge Lazarus, as one of the first acquisitions in the newspaper empire he built over his lifetime. And, a few years later, when his original partner, Judge Lazarus, died in 1924, Newhouse also had enough money to buy up the Lazarus family's share of "Staten Island Advance" stock.

During the 1920s, the Newhouse family also had enough money to loan the money to Henry Garfinkle, which enabled him to open newsstands that were quite good at selling the Newhouse family's "Staten Island Advance" at the St. George's Ferry Terminal on Staten Island, as well as to eventually open newsstands throughout Manhattan, at LaGuardia Airport, at Newark Airpot and at the Port Authority Bus Terminal (the world's largest and most lucrative newsstand)--which also sold other Newhouse publications quite well throughout the years.

During the 1930s Depression, the Newhouse family still had enough money to buy the "Long Island Press" in Jamaica and the previously competing "Long Island Star, "NorthShore Journal" and "Nassau Journal," as well as the "Newark Ledger," the "Newark Star" and newspapers in Syracuse. At the "Long Island Press" during the 1930s--where the Newhouse family was paying its non-unionized newsroom employees 33 percent of what unionized "New York Times" and "New York Daily News" employees were earning for similar work--Samuel Newhouse I's salary was more than the total of all the salaries paid to the Newhouse family's 65 newsroom employees there.

By the time the Newhouse family somehow found the capital to purchase more newspapers in Syracuse, Jersey City and Harrisburg in the 1940s, and in St. Louis, Oregon and Alabama in the 1950s, some people began to wonder how the Newhouse family obtained so much money. And by the time the Newhouse family--whose wealth approached $200 million in the late 1950s--laid down its cash to gobble up "Vogue" and the other Conde Nast magazines, more suspicions about the Newhouse family's source of wealth had developed. As the book "Newspaperman: S.I. Newhouse And The Business Of News" by Richard Meeker recalled:

"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."

One way the Newhouse family apparently was able to accumulate so much money so rapidly during the 20th Century was by hiring accountants and lawyers who figured out unique ways for the Newhouse Dynasty to avoid paying a fair share of taxes on their rapidly growing family wealth. As "Newspaperman" reported:

"`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-Glicklman 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."

The same book also characterized the Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation as "a charity his {Samuel I. Newhouse I's] lawyers had created as an additional tax dodge" and charged that Newhouse Foundation funds were used by the Newhouse family to finance its $18 million purchase of Alabama's "Birmingham News" in 1955.

After Samuel Newhouse I died in 1979, his two sons, S.I. Newhouse, Jr. and Donald Newhouse, were accused of tax evasion by the IRS during the 1980s. Although, subsequently, the IRS dropped its tax fraud charge against the Newhouse Dynasty later in the 1980s, it increased its tax delinquency bil for the Newhouse family to $1.2 billion, since it claimed the Newhouse estate was actually worth $2.2 billion--not $1.2 billion--when Samuel Newhouse I died in 1979, according to the March 13, 1989 issue of "The Nation."

One year after Newhouse's death in 1979 , the Advance Group acquired Random House, which it held until selling it to Bertelsmann in 1998.

The original offices were located on Castleton Avenue in West Brighton neighborhood. In 1960 it moved to its present offices on West Fingerboard Road in Grasmere.

ee also

*Media of New York City

References

External links

* [http://www.ketupa.net/advance.htm Ketupa.net Advance & Newhouse group]
* [http://www.silive.com SILive.com (Advance news portal)]
* [http://www.silive.com/teens FL!P - teenage section]
* [http://www.newhousenews.com/newspapers.html Newhouse Newspapers]