[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.

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.

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.

That meant that every cost that could conceivably be written off as a business deduction was, that assets were depreciated as rapidly as possible, and that new acquisitions were "written up" as high as the law allowed ... Where Newhouse developed a special advantage was in the way he avoided paying taxes for the profits that remained to him after the payment of corporate taxes ...Thanks to an ingenious device created by his accountant, Louis Glickman, and implemented by his attorney, Charles Goldman, Newhouse was able to avoid paying taxes on accumulated earnings and, thus, to multiply the value of his earnings several times.

Doing so involved the creation of a special corporate structure for the various newspapers ... Because the Goldman–Glickman construct kept the various enterprises separate—for tax purposes at least—each could claim the right to its own surplus.