Newhouse: All the Glitter, Power and Glory of America's Richest Media Empire and the Secretive Man Behind It - Hardcover

Maier, Thomas

4.17

12 ratings by Goodreads

9780312114817: Newhouse: All the Glitter, Power and Glory of America's Richest Media Empire and the Secretive Man Behind It

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312114818 ISBN 13: 9780312114817

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 1994

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The fascinating story behind intensely secretive Si Newhouse's powerful, thirteen-billion-dollar media empire is revealed through the exhaustive research of a New York Newsday business and investigative reporter. Major ad/promo.

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About the Author:

Thomas Maier has been an investigative and business reporter for New York Newsday since 1984, and previously worked at the Chicago Sun-Times. He has won several national and regional journalism honors, including the National Society of Professional Journalists’ top reporting prize in 1987 for a series on police misconduct. He co-authored another Newsday series about the nation’s waste crisis which won the national Worth Bingham award and later was published as a book, "The Rush to Burn," Island Press, 1989. At the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, he won the John Patterson award for television documentary-making and his documentary, "The Mob, the Merchants and the Fulton Fish Market," was broadcast by WNET/Channel 13. He later received a John McCloy Journalism Fellowship to Europe, which is awarded by the Columbia Journalism School and the American Council on Germany. In New York, he has won the Page One Award for Crusading Journalism, the 1990 Society of Silurians’ Excellence in Journalism Award, and three first-place awards from the New York State Associated Press Association. He is a member of Newsday’s "Greene Team" investigative unit and was a frequent contributor to Newsday’s Sunday magazine, where the reporting began for this book about the Newhouse empire. Maier lives with his wife Joyce McGurrin and their three sons in Long Island, New York.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Partly a biography of ``the most influential media baron of our time,'' more a critique of that baron's stewardship of the public interest, an ambitious assemblage that falls short of a strong narrative or full indictment. Newsday reporter Maier never received access to his little- known subject--S.I. ``Si'' Newhouse Jr., ruler of a chain of newspapers, of Cond‚ Nast Publications (publisher of Vogue and Vanity Fair, among other magazines), and of the Random House book publishing empire--so his portrait is understandably sketchy. After tracing Newhouse's youthful unhappiness and professional meanderings, the author gets sidetracked with more interesting characters, such as Si's ``surrogate father,'' Alexander Liberman, longtime editorial director of Cond‚ Nast. There, Newhouse blurred ``the distinction between editorial and advertising,'' Maier writes, sins later magnified at the reborn Vanity Fair and the newly acquired New Yorker. The narrative then turns to Si's friendship with the notorious Roy Cohn, who set in motion what seems to be Newhouse's most glaring ethical lapse: the Newhouse- owned Cleveland Plain Dealer succumbed to Mafia pressure to retract an investigative story on Teamster boss Jackie Presser. (Like most controversies in the book, this has been reported on in depth before.) Maier moves on to the complex tax maneuvering that saved oodles for Newhouse's Advance Publications, allowing him to acquire Random House in 1980. The author recounts how Newhouse's bottom- line mentality led to the controversial firings of veteran editors and sullied the company's reputation. Profiling editor Tina Brown (who agreed to interviews), he reveals that Si had planned to pull the plug on Brown's Vanity Fair until the famous Reagan cover turned the magazine's fortunes around. Si often drops out of the narrative when it veers into lengthy but not probing reports on the personalities and internal politics of Newhouse's empire, but Maier makes the worthy point that pundits have rarely examined the way ``the nation's largest private media company'' affects journalism and culture. In the public interest, surely. But will the public, outside the media world, be interested in this mediocre effort? (16 pages of photos, not seen) (First printing of 60,000) -- Copyright �1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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