Not the janitor: Si Newhouse with Anna Wintour, Cond Nast's artistic director
(Image credit: Copyright (c) 2011 Shutterstock. No use without permission.)
Publishing may not be at the cutting edge of technology as is Silicon Valley, or involve as large sums of money as Wall Street, but it still has its characters. It has one fewer since the death of media tycoon Si Newhouse, at the start of this month.
Newhouse joined Cond Nast in 1961, two years after the company had been acquired by his father Samuel. He rose to become chairman in 1975, going on to run the company for four decades before stepping back to become emeritus chairman in 2015, says David Bond in the Financial Times. He "oversaw the transformation of the group into a cultural and luxury magazine powerhouse".
Ironically, despite controlling some of the most well-known fashion and style magazines, Newhouse was understated in many respects. Indeed, one long-standing member of staff remembered him as a "short, scruffy billionaire who was often mistaken for a janitor" by unsuspecting employees who didn't reckon that the man wearing the sweatshirt with dribble down the front might be their boss, says Veronica Howell in The Guardian. Not a fan of fine dining, Newhouse was happier lunching in Cond Nast's cafeteria than at the Four Seasons.
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Not that he was averse to spending money he "maintained two Manhattan homes one as a home, and a second for entertaining". He "owned a modern-art collection that at one time was valued at more than $100m", says Jonathan Kandell in The New York Times. This included pieces by Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, David Smith, Anthony Caro, Mark di Suvero, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and James Rosenquist.
In 1988 he paid $17m for a Jasper Johns painting, at the time a record price for the work of a living artist. He also held an annual birthday party for his dog "at which Evian water was served to canine guests while their owners enjoyed caviar".
Newhouse was generous when it came to his magazines. At their peak, favoured employees at flagship publications "could count on perks that were unusual in the industry", even editorial assistants becoming "accustomed to catered lunches and use of a car service".
Senior editors "received clothing allowances that ran into the tens of thousands of dollars, first-class airfares, virtually unlimited entertainment expenses, and million-dollar loans at subsidised interest rates to buy condominiums and country houses". Job stability was not, however, a hallmark: one editor was "informed of her own firing in 1988 when the gossip columnist Liz Smith announced it on a New York television newscast".
He was a gambler too, says Graydon Carter in Vanity Fair, who was especially willing to back the "things or people he cherished or saw promise in". Indeed, "following his relaunch of Vanity Fair, he saw losses mount to close to $100m before he was in the clear and the magazine began turning a profit". Newhouse was "the last of the great visionaries of the magazine business". With the revival of Vanity Fair in 1983 and the purchase of the New Yorker in 1985, he transformed Cond Nast from an also-ran into "a powerhouse of style and substance".
Tabloid money "life isn't just a balance sheet"
Disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein is casting himself as a victim of his self-diagnosed sex addiction, says Rachel Johnson in the Mail on Sunday. So in the wake of allegations of abuse, Weinstein "flies off to a $7,000-a-night heavy therapy' facility in the Rockies", where he can get to spend the whole of every day not just the part of his day when he is forcing himself on shuddering younger women in a bathrobe. Then he'll emerge a changed man. The unlikely alternative ending is he'll go to prison for a long time. But that's "not the movie Harvey would green-light, and he's a powerful, rich white guy with a lot of friends".
When former chancellor George Osborne initiated the changes to benefits that are causing so much confusion, he probably didn't think that, in 2017, 55p a minute to call the benefits helpline would be too much to pay for the poor, says Brian Reade in the Daily Mirror. He probably thought that, like him, everybody would be holding down seven jobs while paying a £295-a-month subscription to a gym, as he does. "The real cruelty of the Tories, virtually all of whom are raking in outside income, is that they can't comprehend what £5.50 for a ten-minute call means to people who have no money and... they don't really care."
Jackie Doyle-Price, the social-care minister, has said that older people shouldn't regard their houses as assets to pass on to their children, particularly if they need to sell them to fund expensive care if they get ill. She's got it all wrong, says Jennifer Selway in the Daily Express. "Yes, strictly speaking people should sell their assets to pay for what they need. But these two issues our attachment to our family homes and the impact of dementia are hugely emotional special cases." "Life isn't just a balance sheet. There has to be another way."
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