Talk:Long Island Press

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The Long Island Press during the late 50s and early 60s was the showcase property in the Newhouse newspaper empire, which was launched some years earlier with the acquisition of The Staten Island Advance. S.I. Newhouse was the patriarch and chief; his brothers, Teddy and Norman, were active in administration and the decision making at the Press. Norman, who lived in style in posh Manhasset, would drive in to 168th Street in Jamaica, Queens, before dawn every morning to physically make up the front page for the first edition. These were the days of "hot type," set in the composing room by linotype operators. That first edition was destined to be rushed out by truck to Suffolk County in outer Long Island. A second edition contained updated wire stories and local community news and features for Nassau County. The Queens editions and replates represented the bulk of the paper's circulation. As population on Long Island shifted, so did the fate of the newspaper. Archie Bunker's borough of Queens became a magnet for minorities. Circulation began to shrink. Worse, still, the ad base began to defect. Newsday, a lively tabloid based in Nassau County. began to attract more than its share of the lucrative display advertising from the big department stores, Gertz, Mays and Macy's. Their ads were directed toward Nassau's bedroom communities. Long before the term, "profiling." entered the vocabulary, a crass ad manager at Gertz told his space sales counterpart at the Press, "Your readers are our shoplifters."

Non-union editorial executives of the Press, including city editor Dave Jacobs, shifted onto jobs with other Newhouse publications, such as the Syracuse Post-Standard and the Newark Star-Ledger. The newspaper holdings grew to some two dozen properties. Meanwhile the Newhouse brothers and their offspring continued to expand though their privately held Advance Publications (Conde Nast) and are publishers of such well-known magazines at Glamour, Vogue, GQ, Vanity Fair, Wired and even W and Womens Wear Daily. 68.37.218.54 (talk) 22:05, 25 October 2010 (UTC)