Advance Publications may have started out in the newspaper business, but it has since lived up to its name by advancing into magazine publishing. With its 1999 purchase of Disney's Fairchild Publications unit, and Fairchild's recent consolidation under its Condi Nast imprint, the company now has control of almost the entire fashion magazine industry. Through Condi Nast, Advance holds an impressive roster of big-name women's magazines, among them
Glamour,
Vogue,
Mademoiselle,
Allure and
Bride's.
Advance controls a ton of other fabulous magazines, too (all under the Condi Nast name), among them GQ, The New Yorker, Wired and Vanity Fair. The company also owns American City Business Journals, which publishes weekly installments of all things business in 42 cities across the United States (Advance purchased ACBJ in 1995). Finally, Advance's newspaper division, with which it began building its media empire is the country's largest privately-owned newspaper chain. Newhouse Newspapers, as it is known, publishes in 22 cities. As of 2006, Advance Publications employed 30,000 people and brought in annual revenue of over $7 billion.
In 1922, Samuel Newhouse, Sr. bought his first paper in Staten Island and thirty years later he owned numerous papers in several states, concentrated in the Northeast. In 1959, Newhouse bought magazine publisher Condi Nast as an anniversary gift for his wife. Newhouse's sons, the current CEO S.I. "Si" Newhouse Jr. and President Donald Newhouse, took over the company in 1979. The boys purchased major book publisher Random House in 1980, which they owned until Advance sold the publishing house to Bertlesmann in 1998. They added to Condi Nast along the way, like when they purchased The New Yorker in 1985.
After a fall in revenues in the late '80s, the company bought Knapp Publications, which added consumer magazines Architectural Digest and Bon Appetit to its plate. It expanded into trade publications in the 1990s with its purchase of American City Business Journals in 1995. By 1999, it was adding to its retail magazine holdings again, purchasing Fairchild Publications from Walt Disney Co. Advance also owns 25 percent of the Discovery Channel.
Having mastered offline media, Advance Publications collaborated with other media companies like Time Warner to co-produce Time Warner's Road Runner, a high-speed Internet service using cable access. The company also co-owns a major ad site, AdOne Classified Network, with other media companies Stephens Media Group, E.W. Scripps, Hearst Corporation, and MediaNews Group. Advance has its own home on the Internet -- Advance.net is home to every Advance-affiliated web site, complete with links to all of its newspapers and to the similarly themed CondiNet.
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