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A review: why The New York Sun is shutting down?

By Amarendra Bhushan for CEOWORLD Magazine Updated:September 30, 2008

I often disagreed with the editorial bent of the The New York Sun, but I will say that they had fantastic arts coverage, muckraking exposes, and not infrequently the paper’s confident editorials. There will be a Tuesday issue of the New York Sun but it will be the final edition. Seth Lipsky, president and editor, and also a long-time former Wall Street Journal colleague, told staffers in a newsroom meeting Monday that “the decision to close the paper has not been an acrimonious one. It is a logical decision following a hard-headed assessment of our chances of meeting our goal of profitable publication in the near future.” It didn’t help that the Sun‘s push for funding came during a time that “has been one of the worst in a century in which to be trying to raise capital, and in the end we were out not only of money but time.”

Say Goodbye To The New York Sun, a conservative newspaper launched in 2002 as “a conservative alternative to The New York Times,”. The newspaper had been seeking investors over the past two weeks to keep going, but the turn of events on Wall Street over the past few days quashed any hopes of finding new money. Editors had been holding out to see what happened this week and last week had denied that Monday’s paper would be the last. Then on Monday the Dow Jones dropped more than 700 points and Congress failed to pass the government bail-out bill, seemingly sealing The Sun’s fate – at least for now.

CNN reports that The Sun will publish one final edition on Tuesday, according to a spokesperson. The Sun never made a profit and warned readers in early September that it needed “tens of millions” of dollars to cover their losses. The paper had been losing as much as $1 million a month. On Sept. 4, Lipsky announced the paper had endured “substantial” losses and would close at the end of the month without an infusion of cash.

“It was a newspaper especially savored by people who don’t like The New York Times, and there are plenty of those in New York,” said Alex Jones, a former Times reporter who now directs the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. The Sun began business operations in October 2001. It didn’t last nearly as long as its namesake, which won its Pulitzer Prize in 1949 for a series of 24 articles that exposed waterfront corruption and became the inspiration for the film “On the Waterfront.”

The newspaper, funded by investors including Bruce Kovner and Michael Steinhardt, needed “tens of millions” of dollars to cover losses. The original Sun, founded in 1833, was a pioneering newspaper. In 1846, its then-owner, Moses Yale Beach, arranged to share news from the war in Mexico with four rival papers. That agreement marked the founding of The Associated Press, today the world’s largest newsgathering organization.

Seth and the rest of the staff,

I commend you on your valient effort. You gave it everything you possibly could. You should be very proud.

The New York Sun

a contemporary five-day daily newspaper published in New York City

Debuted on April 16, 2002

The New York Sun was well known for its learned and serious arts coverage, which included such critics as Adam Kirsch on literature, Jay Nordlinger on classical music, Joel Lobenthal on dance, Lance Esplund, Maureen Mullarkey, and David Cohen on art, Francis Morrone on art and architecture, Otto Penzler on mystery writing, Eric Ormsby on poetry, Carl Rollyson on biography, Amanda Gordon as society editor and Will Friedwald on jazz. The Sun has also received critical praise for its sports section, whose writers include Steven Goldman, Thomas Hauser, Sean Lahman, Tim Marchman, and John Hollinger. Its crossword puzzle, edited by Peter Gordon, has been called one of the two best in the United States. The Sun acquired the web address www.LatestPolitics.com in 2007. The Audit Bureau of Circulations confirmed that in its first six months of publication the Sun had an average circulation of just under 18,000. The Sun’s online edition has been accessible for free since August 2006.

Seth Lipsky

Seth Lipsky (born in 1946 in Brooklyn) is the current editor of the New York Sun, an independent daily newspaper in New York City. Mr. Lipsky writes most of the Sun’s editorials, and counts Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Winston Churchill, Ariel Sharon, and Milton Friedman as his intellectual and ideological heroes. He has a long history of working in the newspaper business, including a stint for the Wall Street Journal in Asia and Belgium. He is currently a contributing editor for the Journal.

Mr. Lipsky served in the U.S. Armed Forces and wrote for Stars and Stripes while in Vietnam.

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