Latest news with #SiNewhouse
Times
20 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Times
‘Anna Wintour? I found her efforts to seem intimidating almost comical'
I have Anna Wintour to thank for bringing me firmly into the Condé Nast fold — and also for either inadvertently or advertently giving me reason to leave that fold 30 years later. We didn't meet the way normal people do. She essentially inherited me. When Condé Nast's chairman, Samuel Irving 'Si' Newhouse Jr, asked her to take over House & Garden in 1987, she was given a magazine with a charmed history and a number of staff and contract writers, me included. Lacking the discernment of previous editors of my freelance offerings, Anna kept me on contract when she took over. I found Anna in those days to be cosy, conspiratorial and completely enticing. My feelings toward her ran in opposition to the tagline 'Nuclear Wintour', which was then at the beginning of its long run. She was a great and loyal friend, and as a result, she had a lot of close friends. Also, she had gone out with Christopher Hitchens, a big validation in my book.
Bloomberg
16-06-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Condé Nast Was Always a House of Cards. One Man Kept It Standing for Too Long
Despite his vast riches, newspaper heir Samuel Irving 'Si' Newhouse Jr. didn't count for much in midcentury New York. The son of a self-made magnate who'd been publicly dismissed as a 'journalist chiffonier'—a ragpicker—he was a new-money Jew, stymied in society by a city stratified by race, religion and generational wealth. So when his father bought the enfeebled lifestyle publisher Condé Nast, Newhouse began 'to grasp the social possibilities uniquely available to him as the newly minted heir to Vogue,' writes Michael Grynbaum in his new book, Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America (July 15, Simon & Schuster). 'Si had grown up all too conscious of the fine gradations of New York society, the invisible old-world barriers that had kept him, by all appearances a wealthy scion, still stuck on the outside looking in.' (Newhouse died in 2017.) Grynbaum, a veteran reporter for the New York Times, fills his chronicle of Newhouse's half-century at the helm of the legendary publisher with enough gossip and arcana to satisfy even the most devoted of Condé Nast obsessives. But added together, it all feels a little sad. Newhouse was, Grynbaum shows, a striver who hired other strivers to publish magazines for a nation of, yes, strivers. Seen from that angle, the many tales of excess and infighting among Newhouse's famous editors (Anna Wintour, Graydon Carter, Tina Brown) add up to less than the sum of their parts. However successfully these media titans chronicled and embodied the high life, they remained well-coiffed flunkies swanning about in a fragile house of cards. At the height of Condé's cultural impact (arguably in the 1990s), the company barely turned a profit; one executive claimed the entirety of Condé Nast earned less than a single Newhouse-owned newspaper, the Staten Island Advance. It was elite, certainly, but not so much an empire as an expensive Potemkin village: America's upper-middle-class taste and tastemakers, subsidized by a single man.
