The Press: The Newspaper Collector Samuel Newhouse

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Island Advance. It was Bayonne all over again: a sickly property suddenly cured of its ills. Just three years later, Newhouse bought out his partner (although the judge kept the Bayonne Times, which is still owned by his son Herman), and by 1927 he had chased down the last stray share of Advance stock. Sam Newhouse now owned a newspaper. The pyramid had begun.

Leaping a Continent. Slowly, Newhouse accumulated the capital on which to grow. He dislikes borrowing from out siders, has done so rarely: to help him buy the Birmingham News and the Huntsville Times—$8,500,000 on an eight-year note, which Newhouse retired in three years—again this year, when New York's Chemical Bank New York Trust Co. lent him about $20 million toward the purchase of New Orleans.

Seven years passed before Newhouse felt sufficiently provident to buy his second paper. In 1932 he paid $750,000 for 51% of the Long Island Press (later he got it all) in Jamaica, L.I., which was part of the Ridder newspaper chain. After that the pace quickened and prices soared: $3,200,000 for three papers in Syracuse (Sam reduced them to two), $3,500,000 for Harrisburg, Pa., $5,600,000 for the Portland Oregonian in 1950 (see box). With Portland, Sam Newhouse's newspaper menage, until then clustered in the East, spanned the continent. And for the first time, the shy little man from Bayonne began to attract national attention. Not all of it was favorable.

"I Can Wait." Each fresh Newhouse invasion met with stiff local opposition and generated heated arguments about the purity of his motives, his methods, and his influence on U.S. journalism. When Newhouse bought a part of the Denver Post from the daughter of one of the paper's founders, the other daughter took immediate steps to lock him out. "I can wait," said Newhouse, who is never content with less than all of anything he buys.

Fellow publishers seldom speak cordially of Sam. "All he's interested in," says a Chicago colleague, "is the cash register. I don't think he gives a damn about the papers; he just treats them like so many hardware stores. For any publisher you respect, any of those who deeply love journalism, Sam Newhouse would be the last person to sell a paper to." To Eugene Pulliam, who owns nine newspapers in Indiana and Arizona (the Indianapolis Star and News, Phoenix Arizona Republic], making money in newspapering is "secondary." Says Pulliam: "There's a spiritual quality to journalism. I still believe a publisher ought to run his paper personally and stand up and have his say. If you just want to make money, you ought to be in the bond business." Pulliam has his conservative say, and his papers also earn a liberal profit.

Monopoly's Virtues. But such critics miss the crucial point: Newhouse is not the cause, he is merely a symptom of the trend toward monopoly. Nor does every one agree that press monopolies are necessarily evil. The census of dailies has declined, but daily readership has risen stead ily from 27.7 million (26% of the popu lation) in 1920 to more than 59 million (31%) today.

Says Barry Bingham, editor and publish er of Louisville's two dailies, the Courier-Journal and the Times: "A monopoly even has some compensating virtues, such as reducing the danger of pressure from ad vertisers on matters