This image was lost some time after publication.

Who

The chairman of Advance.net, Steve is the son of Advance Publications chief Donald Newhouse, the nephew of Condé Nast overlord Si Newhouse and the husband of Lucky publisher Gina Sanders. He's widely expected to be next in line to take over the media behemoth.

Backstory

An heir to a multi-billion media fortune established by his grandfather, Newhouse has worked for the family business his entire life: He started off selling newspaper classified ads at the age of 16, interned at the Staten Island Advance, and penned obits for the Oregonian while a student at Yale.

Newhouse was just 26 when his father named him editor-in-chief of The Jersey Journal, a job for which, he later admitted, he was "woefully unprepared." He's held on to the title, but his responsibilities have broadened a great deal over the years. For close to a decade, he's been the chairman of Advance.net, where he has responsibility for the collection of websites under the Condé Nast and Advance Newspapers umbrella, including the newspaper-affiliated sites (Newark Star-Ledger, Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Oregonian), and the online arms of magazines (Vanity Fair, the New Yorker). He's also become one of the company's most powerful decision makers behind the scenes, acting as proxy for his aged uncle and father.

Of note

Like other members of the media old-guard, Condé has been exceedingly slow to embrace the web: It was only in 2006 that the company started to revamp its magazine sites and expand online operations in a major way. Newhouse has overseen a handful of web acquisitions, paying $25 million to reunite Wired.com with Wired, and purchasing Reddit, which provides the technology that powers Lipstick.com. He's also been the driving force behind several new launches, including Flip.com, the company's social networking site. Unfortunately, many of the new ventures and initiatives—like Flip.com, which was a couple years late to the party—have yet to prove themselves and there's good reason to remain skeptical about the "monolithic, lumbering, hydra-headed beast," as a blogger once described it.

Not that this will have much of an impact on Steve's career prospects. Widely believed to be the family member who will assume control of the company following the retirement of his father and uncle, he exerts a good deal of influence over the broader portfolio of Condé media assets, including its dozens of newspapers and magazines.

Family ties

It was Steve's grandfather, Samuel Newhouse, who founded the media conglomerate. His father, Donald, now manages Advance's newspaper and cable assets; his uncle, Si, heads up the magazine division. (They took over from Samuel in 1979.) While Steve is widely believed to be heir apparent, one other possible successor is Jonathan Newhouse, Donald and Si's first cousin, who lives in London and is chairman of Condé Nast International.

Personal

Newhouse is married to Gina Sanders, the former publisher of Teen Vogue and now the publisher of Condé Nast-owned cash cow Lucky. They live in the Village.