When the New York Sun launched, some wags at the New York Post hung up an office pool in the middle of the newsroom predicting the date the upstart new daily would fold. No one gave the Sun more than two years. Joke's on you, New York Post! The Sun remained unprofitable and unread for six years until the investors had enough and threatened to pull the plug! Now the niche Zionist-conservative daily will fold at the end of the month unless it finds new backers, and Rupert Murdoch—who saved the populist-conservative Post 15 years ago—will probably not step in. Did you know the paper was doomed from the start by wealthy Canadian criminal idiot Conrad Black? The paper's founder, Seth Lipsky, wanted the paper to be a six-page, small-circulation broadsheet. But original backer Conrad had other plans!
"He felt the better approach would be to go for a newspaper that is not a quixotic paper operating on the margin like a six-page broadsheet," Mr. Lipsky said, "but that one should go for what he called a ‘primary read,' which he said would need to be a 16-page broadsheet with a sports page and a business page."
The sports page has been consistently one of the best in the city, of course, but wealthy conservative Jews probably would've been more likely to subsidize that tiny broadsheet about Israeli issues and foreign policy with a local bent. They weren't going to switch from the Times (or the Journal even, where Murdoch is now trying out a similar "let's have a sports page" strategy). As a result, the Sun never had any paid circulation worth speaking of. Lipsky says he's raised "a lot" of money to save the paper, but who knows what October will bring. Maybe they should go tabloid. P.S. Anyone seriously thinking they'll miss the independent voice and rebellious spirit of this doomed broadsheet should probably remind themselves of this:
One former editor said the staff had drunk Champagne in the newsroom in 2003 when the American-led invasion of Iraq began. As at least one commentator noted in the wake of Mr. Lipsky's letter, The Sun, in editorials, had mentioned Vice President Dick Cheney as "the one who would bring the most to the race" for president this year.
Damn good arts section, though.