The ''Staten Island Advance'' is a daily newspaper published in the borough of
Staten Island
Staten Island ( ) is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Richmond County, in the U.S. state of New York. Located in the city's southwest portion, the borough is separated from New Jersey by the Arthur Kill and the Kill Van Kull an ...
in New York City. The only daily newspaper published in the borough, and the only major daily paper focused on a borough, it covers news of local and community interest, 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 It is the namesake and nominal flagship publication of
Advance Publications
Advance Publications, Inc., doing business as Advance, is an American media company owned by the descendants of S.I. Newhouse Sr., Donald Newhouse and S.I. Newhouse Jr. It owns a large number of subsidiary companies, including Condé Nast, an ...
.
History
The ''Advance'' was created in 1886 by printer John J. Crawford and businessman James C. Kennedy as the ''Richmond County Advance''. The name was changed to the ''Daily Advance'' before it was changed to its current name. When the ''Advance'' began, there were nine competing daily newspapers in Staten Island. The circulation of the ''Advance'' surpassed these early competitors. Its circulation grew from 4,500 in 1910 to over 80,000 by the mid 1990s.
In 1908,
Samuel Irving Newhouse Sr.
Samuel Irving Newhouse Sr. (born Solomon Isadore Neuhaus; May 24, 1895 – August 29, 1979) was an American broadcasting businessman, as well as a magazine and newspaper publisher. He was the founder of Advance Publications.
Early life
Newhouse ...
started working for New Jersey Democratic machine politician, ''Bayonne Times'' newspaper owner, and Judge Hyman Lazarus's law office as an office-boy, bookkeeper and rent-collector. By the time Samuel Newhouse Sr. was 21 in 1916, his boss Lazarus rewarded him with a salary of around $30,000 per year, and 25 percent ownership of the ''Bayonne Times'', for loyal service.
Newhouse purchased the ''Staten Island Advance'' with Lazarus in 1922. This was one of the first newspapers he acquired. When Lazarus died in 1924, Newhouse bought his family's share of ''Staten Island Advance'' stock.
During the 1920s, the Newhouse family loaned money to Henry Garfinkle, which enabled him to open newsstands that increased sales of the Newhouse family's ''Staten Island Advance'' at the St. George Ferry Terminal on Staten Island, and later opened newsstands throughout Manhattan, as well as LaGuardia Airport, Newark Airport, and the Port Authority Bus Terminal (the world's largest and most lucrative newsstand).
Even during the
Great Depression
The Great Depression (19291939) was an economic shock that impacted most countries across the world. It was a period of economic depression that became evident after a major fall in stock prices in the United States. The economic contagio ...
in the 1930s, the Newhouse family had enough money to buy the ''Long Island Press'' in Jamaica and competitors ''Long Island Star'', ''North Shore Journal'' and ''Nassau Journal'', as well as the ''
Newark Ledger'', the ''Newark Star'' and newspapers in Syracuse. The Newhouse family paid its non-unionized newsroom employees at the Long Island Press one third less than the unionized ''New York Times'' and ''New York Daily News'' paid its reporters for similar work in the 1930s. Newhouse paid himself a salary greater than the total of all the salaries paid to the 65 newsroom employees there.
The Newhouse family purchased newspapers in Syracuse, Jersey City and Harrisburg in the 1940s, and in St. Louis, Oregon and Alabama in the 1950s. Some began to wonder how the Newhouse family obtained so much money. The Newhouse family's wealth approached $200 million in the late 1950s, enabling it to purchase ''
Vogue
Vogue may refer to:
Business
* ''Vogue'' (magazine), a US fashion magazine
** British ''Vogue'', a British fashion magazine
** ''Vogue Arabia'', an Arab fashion magazine
** ''Vogue Australia'', an Australian fashion magazine
** ''Vogue China'', ...
'' and other Conde Nast magazines. Author Richard Meeker describes the mounting suspicions about the Newhouse family's source of wealth in ''Newspaperman: S.I. Newhouse and the Business Of News'':
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–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
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is the revenue service for the United States federal government, which is responsible for collecting U.S. federal taxes and administering the Internal Revenue Code, the main body of the federal statutory tax ...
would have allowed had Newhouse simply treated all of his operations as a single corporation.
Meeker characterized the Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation as "a charity his
Samuel Irving Newhouse Sr.
Samuel Irving Newhouse Sr. (born Solomon Isadore Neuhaus; May 24, 1895 – August 29, 1979) was an American broadcasting businessman, as well as a magazine and newspaper publisher. He was the founder of Advance Publications.
Early life
Newhouse ...
'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 Sr. died in 1979, his two sons,
Samuel Irving Newhouse Jr.
Samuel Irving "S.I." Newhouse Jr. (November 8, 1927 – October 1, 2017) was an American heir to a substantial magazine and media business. Together with his brother Donald, he owned Advance Publications, founded by their late father in 1922, wh ...
and Donald Newhouse, were accused of tax evasion by the IRS in 1983.
While the IRS dropped tax fraud charges against them in the 1980s, it increased the Newhouse family tax delinquency bill to $1.2 billion, asserting that the Newhouse estate was actually worth $2.2 billion—not $1.2 billion—when Samuel Newhouse Sr. died in 1979, according to the March 13, 1989, issue of ''The Nation''.
One year after Newhouse's death in 1979, the Advance Group purchased
Random House
Random House is an American book publisher and the largest general-interest paperback publisher in the world. The company has several independently managed subsidiaries around the world. It is part of Penguin Random House, which is owned by Germ ...
, but sold it to
Bertelsmann
Bertelsmann SE & Co. KGaA () is a German private multinational conglomerate corporation based in Gütersloh, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It is one of the world's largest media conglomerates, and is also active in the service sector and ...
in 1998.
The original office of the ''Staten Island Advance'' was located on Castleton Avenue in the
West Brighton
West New Brighton (also called West Brighton) is a neighborhood of Staten Island, New York City, situated along the central North Shore. The neighborhood is bordered by New Brighton to the east, Port Richmond to the west, the waters of the Kil ...
neighborhood. In 1960, the paper moved to the current office on West Fingerboard Road in
Grasmere. For many years, this office also doubled as the nominal headquarters for Advance Publications; the company did not have a formal headquarters for much of its history.
Writers
* Giavanni Alves
* Erik Bascome
* Kristin Dalton
* Charlie De Biase Jr.
* Maura Grunlund
* Annalise Knudson
* Kyle Lawson
* Paul Liotta
* Shaina McLawrence
* Joseph Ostapiuk
* Tracey Porpora
* Jason Paderon
* Nicholas Regina
* Priya Shahi
* Mark Stein
* Tom Wrobleski
See also
*
Media of New York City
New York City has been called the media capital of the world. The media of New York City are internationally influential and include some of the most important newspapers, largest publishing houses, biggest record companies, and most prolific te ...
References
External links
SILive.com (''Advance'' news portal)Published articles of former ''FL!P'' writer, Brandon S. Touhey
{{Advance Publications
Daily newspapers published in New York City
Staten Island
Publications established in 1886
Advance Publications
1886 establishments in New York (state)
New York City local newspapers, in print