As I understand Newhouse: All the Glitter, Power, & Glory of America’s Richest Media Empire & the Secretive Man Behind It, its author, Thomas Maier, said the Newhouse family was in the business of providing information to Americans. They owned magazines, newspapers, and cable systems, but newspapers were the empire's backbone. Growth potential was capped, but profit margins and cash flow were fat.

For many years, newspapers were the best way to distribute localized information, so they captured the attention of many readers. The Newhouses recognized this and executed a local monopoly strategy. Newhouse newspapers were often the only paper in town—the only way consumers could read local news. The papers, which had the attention of an entire community, were a microphone with which to talk to it. Companies paid a premium for the right to use the microphone to speak to the community, which drove highly profitable advertising revenue. Once a local monopoly was established, it was hard to compete with. It would generate predictable revenues and cash flows for years and wouldn’t require much reinvestment from the Newhouse family. The result was an annual stream of cash that the family invested into other businesses.

The book was first published in 1994 so it doesn’t capture how the internet disrupted their local monopoly strategy, but I’d imagine it negatively impacted their newspapers as it did the rest of the industry. The internet made information more readily available and made it easier for companies to reach consumers in a specific community. Meta (Facebook), Alphabet (Google), and others are now enormous companies and still growing quickly. Much of their revenue comes from advertising, which went to newspapers before the internet era.

The Newhouse family still has an empire, but I’m pretty sure that newspapers are no longer its backbone. I’m curious about how the family adjusted their strategy to respond to the internet’s impact and about what business is now the empire’s backbone. The Newhouse family’s companies aren’t publicly traded so information isn’t available via the SEC, but I’ll do some research and see what I can find.