Staten Island Advance

The Staten Island Advance is a daily newspaper published in Staten Island, one of the five boroughs of New York City. It is the only daily newspaper published in Staten Island and the only major daily newspaper focused on covering it exclusively. Staten Island Advance covers news of local and community interest, including Staten Island politics. Staten Island Advance is the namesake and nominal flagship publication of Advance Publications.

As of April 25, 2007, the newspaper's weekday circulation was down 3.9% from 2006, to 59,461, and its Sunday circulation dropped 4.6% from 2006, to 73,203.

The Advance was founded in 1886 by printer John J. Crawford and businessman James C. Kennedy and initially known as the Richmond County Advance. The name was later changed to the Daily Advance and then to its current name. When The Advance was founded in 1886, there were nine competing daily newspapers in Staten Island. The circulation of The Advance quickly surpassed these early competitors, growing from 4,500 in 1910 to over 80,000 by the mid-1990s.^{[citation needed]}

In 1908, Samuel Irving Newhouse Sr. began working as an office assistant to Hyman Lazarus, an attorney, owner of the Bayonne Times, and a leader of New Jersey's Democratic Party machine. By 1916, when Newhouse was 21, Lazarus rewarded him with a salary of around $30,000 per year, and 25 percent ownership of the Bayonne Times, for loyal service.

In 1922, Newhouse and Lazarus purchased the Staten Island Advance in one of the first in a series of newspapers Lazarus acquired. When Lazarus died in 1924, Newhouse bought his family's share of Staten Island Advance stock.

Throughout the 1920s, the Newhouse family loaned money to Henry Garfinkle, which enabled him to open newsstands that increased sales of the newspaper at St. George Ferry Terminal on Staten Island, and later opened newsstands throughout Manhattan and at LaGuardia Airport in Queens, Newark Airport in Newark, New Jersey, and Port Authority Bus Terminal; the newsstand at Port Authority was, at the time, the world's largest and most lucrative newsstand.

Even during the Great Depression in the 1930s, the Newhouse family had enough money to buy the Long Island Press in Jamaica, Queens and several of its competitors, including the Long Island Star, North Shore Journal, Nassau Journal, Newark Ledger, the Newark Star, and newspapers in Syracuse, New York. Throughout the 1930s, the Newhouse family paid its non-unionized newsroom employees at the Long Island Press a third less than the unionized employees at The New York Times and New York Daily News. Newhouse, in turn, paid himself a salary greater than the total of all the salaries paid to the 65 Staten Island Advance newsroom employees combined.

Throughout the 1940s, the Newhouse family continued aggressively acquiring purchasing newspapers in Syracuse, Jersey City, New Jersey, and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In the 1950s, they acquired newspapers in St. Louis, Oregon, and Alabama. The Newhouse family's wealth approached $200 million in the late 1950s, enabling it to purchase Vogue and other Conde Nast magazines. Author Richard Meeker describes the mounting suspicions about the Newhouse family's source of wealth in Newspaperman: S.I. Newhouse and the Business Of News: