The Press: Deal in Denver

Into Denver's mile-high sunshine last week stepped the fastest-growing newspaper publisher in the U.S. In one hand he carried a battered 13-year-old briefcase bulging with the blueprints of a big deal. Within 24 hours Publisher Samuel I. Newhouse, 65, left Denver with what he had come for: a 15% cut of the Denver Post (circ. 256,513), plus definite expectations of ultimately gaining full control.

Newhouse is a publisher who has devoted himself less to the profession of journalism than to the buying of newspapers as business properties. Beginning with the Staten Island (N.Y.) Advance in 1922, he has spent 38 years and $50 million building an empire of 14 papers with a circulation totaling 2,000,000*— ranking second in importance in the U.S., ahead of the dwindling Hearst chain (down to 13 dailies from a high of 26) but behind Scripps-Howard (18).

"Buy?" "Sure." Newhouse has collect ed these newspaper properties as another man might collect sculpture. In 1939 he paid $1,900,000 for two Syracuse papers after a single telephone call from a broker. Says Newhouse: "He called and said, 'Do you want to buy Syracuse?' And I said, 'Sure.' " Newhouse paid $5,250,000 — cash — for the Portland Oregonian without ever seeing the plant. Newhouse's cash re serves are so plentiful, his acquisitiveness so indefatigable, that last year he bought a $5,000,000 controlling interest in Conde Nast Publications, which publishes Vogue and five other magazines, as a surprise anniversary present for his wife Mitzi.

Once having purchased a paper, Newhouse is interested mainly in making it pay — as 12 of the 14 Newhouse papers do. Editorial policy and the practice of journalism are matters he leaves to his editors, who do not even have to carry his name on the masthead and are free to endorse any cause. Says Newhouse: "It may be temperament, it may be inclina tion, but I will not interfere with my editors, or with local affairs." The Bir mingham News is rabidly segregation ist; in Syracuse, the Democrat-leaning Herald-Journal and the Republican Post-Standard carry on a constant editorial feud.

Sam Newhouse likes to be a bit off handed about his press purchases. Ex plaining that his son Donald, who is pub lisher of the Jersey Journal (circ. 93,998), also oversees Newhouse papers in Birmingham and Huntsville, Ala. and in Portland, Ore., Newhouse says of his Post deal: "Denver makes a nice stop on the way from Alabama to Portland." Be that as it may, Sam Newhouse picked up a slice of a famed newspaper.

Inimitable to Dependable. A struggling frontier-town daily until 1895, when it was bought by Harry H. Tammen, a onetime Denver bartender, and Frederick G. Bonfils, who reaped an $800,000 fortune by fleecing Kansans in a lottery, the Denver Post bloomed under their cultivation into the wildest flower in the Wild West. Its front page was a crazy quilt of blaring headlines, many in red ink, and along the order of DOES IT HURT TO BE BORN?