Theodore Newhouse; Helped Build Newspaper Group

Theodore Newhouse, an expert in newspaper management and production who helped build one of the world’s largest news organizations, died Saturday after a long illness. He was 95.

Newhouse was associate publisher of the Newhouse newspaper group and with his brothers, Samuel I. and Norman Newhouse, built and operated the family-owned enterprise.

Today, the Newhouse holdings include 26 newspapers in 22 cities; the Conde Nast magazine group; Parade, the Sunday newspaper supplement; American City Business Journals, a group of business newspapers published in more than 30 major cities in America; and interests in cable television programming and cable systems serving 1 million homes.

The Newhouse brothers helped develop and institute such innovative newspaper management policies as local autonomy for publishers and editors of group-owned newspapers. Samuel I. Newhouse died in 1979, and Norman Newhouse died in 1988.

The company is now run by S.I. Newhouse’s sons, Samuel I. Jr., the chairman, and Donald, the president.

Donald Newhouse said Saturday that his uncle “had a complete knowledge of newspapers and was very direct and forthright. He called it like he saw it.”

Ted Newhouse was business manager for 45 years of the Long Island Press, his home base in the New York City borough of Queens, until the paper shut down in 1977.

He was born July 19, 1903, in Bayonne, N.J. As a child, he hawked newspapers and scrounged for coal and firewood.

Family members got what Ted Newhouse called crucial “on-the-job training” in their first 10 years at the Staten Island Advance before they bought the Long Island Press in 1932.

S.I. was publisher. Ted ran the classified advertising department and then became general business manager. He also reviewed concerts and wrote a music column.

In 1956, several years after the death of his first wife, Beatrice, Ted Newhouse married Caroline Herz.

In addition to his wife, he leaves two granddaughters.