New newspaper to hit New York newsstands REMAKE OF SUN, FAMOUS FOR SANTA CLAUS COLUMN

Mercury News ^ | 04/14/2002 | Larry McShane

[Quicksilver]

NEW YORK - Yes, Virginia, there is a New York Sun again.

The new Sun, a weekday broadsheet entering the nation's most competitive newspaper market, hits newsstands Tuesday as New York's fourth daily paper -- and its first new arrival since 1985.

[Quicksilver]

His new paper won't read like a tabloid or the Times -- the more conservative Sun will espouse a "center-right, free- market, limited- government, low taxes" approach on its editorial page, Lipsky said.

[Quicksilver]

Give the NY Slimes he!!

[JAWs]

Great. Don't I have enough to read as is? Looks like I'll have to chuck the TV...

<G>

[Quicksilver]

http://www.nysun.com/

[Quicksilver]

Chuck the Times. ;-)

[My Favorite Headache]

Press release bump...

[JAWs]

I scawn the editorials to see the operative lies.

[Quicksilver]

ping

[kellynla]

Wish we had another paper in L.A. Sure miss the Herald-Examiner. Have to read the O.C. Register to get some conservative op-eds.

[BluesDuke]

My first experience with daily newspapers as a small boy was growing up in the Bronx (until I was 7) and my parents reading all the New York papers at various times. The old New York World-Telegram and Sun (the old Sun merged into the World-Telegram) was one of them; there, among other pleasures, was I introduced to the greatest sports cartoonist of the century - Willard Mullin. And their understated news and sportswriting style was something to cherish. It was a sad day when the World-Telegram and Sun, the Herald-Tribune, and the Journal-American collapsed into the short-lived and rather pretentious World Journal Tribune for about fifteen months...

[lowbridge]

His new paper won't read like a tabloid or the Times -- the more conservative Sun will espouse a "center-right, free- market, limited- government, low taxes" approach on its editorial page, Lipsky said.

How about some pretty girls on page 3 like they do in England?

[Mike Darancette]

The old Sun was best known for its "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus" column -- its response to an 1897 letter from an 8-year-old girl asking if there really was a Santa Claus.

Good thing Virginia didn't write to the Times, their response would have been;

Yes, Virginia the NY Times Editorial Board has determined that there is NO Santa Claus. There is also NO Tooth Fairy, NO Easter Bunny, NO God and No hope.

[Mike Darancette]

I forgot to add; Women and Minorities effected disproportionately.

[rmlew]

Did anyone else get an automated acall today asking us to subscribe?
I'll pick it up at the newsstand.
Frankly, I question the viability of the NY Sun (and said so to Lipsky and the guy who ran Smartertiomes.com at a NYYRC meeting.)
There already is a paper with a neo-con editorial page, the NY Post. Furthermore, there is a business oriented paper on the right in NYC, the Wall Street Journal. Who then will read the Sun?

[mrustow]

"The notion of a city the size and diversity of New York being served by only one broadsheet -- good as The New York Times is, and it's fabulous -- is illogical," he said.

Lipsky doesn't believe that for a second. He founded the anti-Times website, Smartertimes.com, which his protege, Ira Stoll, has run for the past two years.

[mrustow]

My Mama has always said, the best paper in town was the Herald Tribune. She says that in her lifetime (born 1930), the Times was always the most influential, but that its writing never matched its pretenses.

[GeronL]

This thing won't survive in liberal New York. This paper or the Washington Times need to go national (all the big markets) to make it.

[BluesDuke]

Without question, the Herald Tribune was a writers' paper. Tom Wolfe came up when New York magazine was the Tribune's Sunday magazine. Red Smith became a sportswriting legend with the Herald Tribune; Roger (The Boys of Summer) Kahn made his bones covering the Brooklyn Dodgers of 1952-53 for the Trib; Jimmy Breslin (before his cantankerous liberalism got the better of him) helped (with Wolfe) to create the "New Journalism" on the Tribune in the early 1960s (including his seminal book about the original New York Mets, Can't Anybody Here Play This Game). The Times may have been the paper of record, but the Herald Tribune was the paper of papers in those years, with the World Telegram and Sun at its best a worthy competitor to the Trib's style and substances.

[mrustow]

It all comes down to overhead. New York Newsday overpaid star staffers: $400,000 per, to a broken-down Jimmy Breslin, and a whopping, cool mil to Liz Smith. And its socialist staff -- fronm the top down -- were contemptuous of the idea that a newspaper is a business.

With forty full-time writers, Lipsky already has over $2 mil in writing staff expenses, not counting freelancers (whom he'll probably pay peanuts). Then there's rent, newsprint, printing (I don't think they have their own facilities), editing, production, and administrative staffs, delivery men and trucks, etc., etc. It all adds up, in a hurry.

I wish Lipsky luck, but I haven't come across any New York newspapermen who had both access to start capital and a knack for keeping down costs in the 16 years I've lived in NYC.