`Parade' Magazine's Newhouse/`Vogue' Connection

(The following article first appeared in the 11/18/92 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative newspaper Downtown)

“A late 19th-century institution, the Sunday newspaper magazine, showed renewed signs of life in the eighties…Parade remains the largest Sunday supplement in America.

“Several of these Sunday magazines are advertising gold mines, drawing on both local and national advertisers…” (The Magazine In America: 1741-1990 by John Tebbel and Mary Zuckerman)

“Also in the Advance lineup is Parade, distributed as a Sunday supplement in 314 newspapers to a massive 64.8 million people. (The Last Days of The New Yorker by Gigi Mahon in 1988)

“At one point 64 Newhouse cousins, brothers, in-laws and other assorted relatives were on the payroll.” (Everybody’s Business in 1990)

“…The several million readers of the chain’s 26 newspapers doubtless would find instructive an exploration of the government’s accusation that the Newhouse family had dodged more than $1 billion in taxes.” (The Nation magazine on March 13, 1989)

Every Sunday, newspapers like the Washington Post and the Boston Globe distribute the magazine with the largest circulation in the United States: Parade magazine. But Parade is published by neither the Washington Post nor the Boston Globe. Parade is actually owned by the Newhouse media conglomerate—Advance Publications—that also markets magazines like Vogue, Glamour, Self, GQ, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Details, as well as daily newspapers in Newark, Jersey City, Trenton, Staten Island, Syracuse, Harrisburg, Cleveland, Michigan, Massachusetts, Oregon, Alabama, Mississippi and New Orleans. If the family which owns Parade magazine paraded representatives of its magazines and newspapers up Fifth Avenue, more than 30 publications would be represented in the Newhouse Dynasty’s line of march.

Asked by Downtown in a Fall 1992 telephone interview to characterize the Newhouse company’s relationship to Parade, its then-public relations spokesperson, Catherine Hemlepp, replied at that time: “Parade is owned by Advance Publications. Our chairman reports directly to S.I. Newhouse.”

The Parade spokesperson also noted in 1992 that, despite the U.S. economic downturn, Parade’s advertising income was still increasing in the 1990s.

(Downtown 11/18/92)