Donald Newhouse, the billionaire newspaper publisher who helped oversee one of America’s most powerful media empires and whose family name remains synonymous with Condé Nast, has died at 96.
Newhouse died Tuesday at his home in Lambertville, New Jersey, from lymphoma, according to the New York Times. He and his older brother, Samuel Irving Newhouse Jr., better known as Si, inherited a vast media conglomerate from their father and spent decades shaping American media landscape.
While Si Newhouse became closely associated with Condé Nast and titles including Vanity Fair, Vogue, The New Yorker, and Architectural Digest, Donald largely focused on the company’s newspaper business via Advance Publications. He spent years running The Star-Ledger in Newark and helped expand Advance Publications’ newspaper holdings across the country through regional newspapers including Cleveland’s The Plain Dealer, The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, and Portland’s The Oregonian.
The brothers were known for maintaining a close relationship despite overseeing different corners of the empire, and frequently traded business notes over dinners at Sette Mezzo on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
Donald Newhouse’s death comes just days after Christie’s marquee evening sales featured a major group of works from Si Newhouse’s collection. The 16-lot sale brought in $630.8 million with fees and pushed the cumulative total from Newhouse collection sales past $1 billion.
The sale included major works by Jackson Pollock, Constantin Brâncuși, Joan Miró, Jasper Johns, Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, and Andy Warhol. Pollock’s Number 7A, 1948 sold for $181.2 million with fees after a 10-minute bidding battle, setting a new auction record for the artist.
Though Donald Newhouse maintained a far lower public profile than his brother, he remained a towering figure in American publishing. Anna Wintour described him as “an outward-blazing light” who filled rooms with “energy and humor” in a statement published by NJ.com after his death.
