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No Need for Two. The gradual decline in the chorus of political voices, the equalizing effect of the big wire services, whose international coverage appears—often verbatim—in nearly every U.S. daily, the glandular growth of syndicated features and columnists, and even the steadily rising per-copy cost of newspapers have all combined to help winnow the ranks. Newsmagazines have cut heavily into newspaper readership. So .has TV, which, from a-dead start around 1948, now absorbs some 14% of every advertising dollar—and five hours daily of the average televiewer's leisure time.
Says University of Minnesota Journalism Professor Raymond B. Nixon, who has made a study of the trend toward press monopoly: "The newspapers have changed their roles since the rise of monopolies "nd chains. They are not regarded today as primarily political mouthpieces." Today's reader, says Nixon, "buys newspapers for information and expects both sides of political questions. When newspapers started doing this, the need for reading two newspapers disappeared." The nation's press, always provincial in character, has become even more so. The metropolitan daily must bid for its readers not only against newsmagazines and TV, but against the suburban press—which has expanded in almost exact proportion to the contraction of the big-city press. Even one-note chains have come to recognize that each link must be deeply embedded in local affairs. Newhouse recognized this from the start. "The heart and essence of the Newhouse formula is strong local management," says Philip Hochstein, 58, who joined the Newhouse organization in 1927 and is now editorial consultant to all the papers. "The Newhouse group goes all the way from the neighborhood paper to the regional paper, but it stops there."
The Right Time. Shrewd as he is in his chosen business, Samuel I. Newhouse was cast by accident in the role of newspaper collector: he just happened to appear at the right time, with the right price and an insatiable appetite to buy. Only chance determined that what he bought was newspapers.
As the oldest of eight children born, on May 24, 1895, to Meyer and Rose Fatt Newhouse, young Sam almost missed childhood altogether—so did most of the young Newhouses. Father Meyer, a Russian Jew who migrated to Bayonne, N.J., before completing his rabbinical training, was a man of many miseries. He never succeeded in lifting his family above wretched poverty. Frail and asthmatic, the unhappy Talmud scholar worked occasionally in a factory, making suspender ends, but everybody had to pitch in. Mother Newhouse sold drygoods door to door; Norman, one of Sam's three brothers, .was set to peddling papers at the age of five.
When Sam was 13. his father's health failed, and by the rigid seniority rules governing the Newhouse clan, the oldest male child took over as head of the family. Sam's qualifications for this office were fewer than his years: a grammar-school education at Bayonne's P.S. 7, plus whatever acumen he had absorbed in a business course in Manhattan (to save the 3¢ ferry fare, young Newhouse toted