Donald E. Newhouse, who helped turn New Jersey's Star-Ledger into a powerhouse and expanded his family's media empire while staying largely out of the spotlight, died Tuesday at his New Jersey home at the age of 96, per NJ.com. Newhouse's son Steven tells the New York Times that his father died of lymphoma. The son of Advance Publications founder Samuel I. Newhouse, Donald Newhouse shared control of the company with his brother, Si, steering newspapers and cable holdings while Si, who the AP notes died in 2017, focused on Conde Nast magazines.
Donald Newhouse took over the then-struggling Star-Ledger in 1964 at the age of 35 and spent four decades building it into a dominant New Jersey paper, backing ambitious reporting that helped Advance's newspapers rack up a dozen Pulitzers between 2001 and 2012, per NJ.com. He also pushed early into digital with projects that evolved into NJ.com and Advance Local Media. Beyond newspapers, Newhouse helped grow a major cable portfolio and was an early investor in the Discovery Channel.
A major benefactor of Syracuse University's Newhouse School and a driving force in frontotemporal dementia research after the 2015 death of his wife, Susan, Newhouse was remembered by editors and executives as an ambitious but "unpretentious" owner whose priority, even on 9/11, was getting the news out. "His voice was never the loudest in the room, but it was often the wisest," Louis Boccardi, ex-president and CEO of the AP, for which Newhouse once served as board chair, tells the news agency. Newhouse is survived by three children, six grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.
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