Nation Says NY Sun Is Bleeding $1M A Month; Sun Has No Comment

The left-leaning Lotharios at the Nation fired a pointed shot across the bow at the conservative New York Sun yesterday with a thrashing column by Scott Sherman:

When the Sun was born in 2002, media soothsayers predicted that it would never find a permanent place in New York’s brutally competitive newspaper market and that the hearse would arrive within two years. But the Sun is still here, and on April 16 it will mark its fifth anniversary. Although it is funded by a coterie of wealthy individuals, published on a shoestring and edited by a tenacious journalist, Seth Lipsky, the paper is not a financial success: Last year Lipsky told journalism students at Columbia that the Sun lost $1 million a month. But those losses amount to pocket change for the proprietors, whose investment and ongoing commitment have yielded something else: a broadsheet that injects conservative ideology into the country’s most influential philanthropic, intellectual and media hub; a paper whose day-to-day coverage of New York City emphasizes lower taxes, school vouchers and free-market solutions to urban problems; a paper whose elegant culture pages hold their own against the Times in quality and sophistication; a paper that breaks news and crusades on a single issue.

That issue? Sherman calls the a paper “that functions as a journalistic SWAT team against individuals and institutions seen as hostile to Israel and Jews; and a paper that unapologetically displays the scalps of its victims.”

FishbowlNY asked the Sun for a response, but they declined to give us one.

Fine, but let’s do a little media extrapolation, shall we? So, the Sun loses $1,000,000 month, which is about $50,000 per issue (assuming they put out 20 per month). According a bit below in the article, the circulation is approximately 100,000 daily (with 85% given away for free). So for every newspaper the Sun prints, they lose 50 cents.

No wonder people in newspapers say the industry’s f*cked.

Sun-rise in New York [Nation]

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