New York Sun obit by Stephen Miller (GREAT)
hyfler/rosner
By STEPHEN MILLER | September 30, 2008
http://www.nysun.com/obituaries/picking-up-the-flag-of-the-sun/86844/
One day in April 2002, the managing editor of what was about to become
The New York Sun, Ira Stoll, sat down with a reporter for the paper,
Ben Smith, for an interview with New York's new mayor. When
conversation turned to the proposed Second Avenue subway line, Mr.
Stoll inquired whether the city might sell the subways to a private
entrepreneur. The mayor, Michael Bloomberg, responded with the
question, "What are you smoking?"
That question inspired the headline over the Sun's first editorial,
announcing the paper's penchants for free markets and private
enterprise. "We have chosen to pick up the flag of the Sun," the
editorial said, in a reference to the famed New York broadsheet that
folded in 1950 after more than a century of publication, "because it
reminds us more than that of any other newspaper of the importance of
guiding principle. For more than a century, the Sun stood for
constitutional government, equality under the law, free enterprise,
and the American idea."
That editorial, "What We're Smoking," was followed by another, "The
War Against the Jews," pegged to a vast demonstration on the
Washington Mall and illuminating another theme that animated the seven
years of the Sun. Whereas the original New York Sun uncovered the
mob's involvement with shipping that became the basis for "On the
Waterfront," the new Sun helped crack corruption at the United Nations
and disclosed student complaints of bias against Israel at Columbia
University.
Always a strong editorial voice for New Yorkers and the freedom to
pursue their dreams, the paper's op-ed pages became a soapbox for
thinkers, reformers, and columnists such as, to name but a few, James
Q. Wilson, James Grant, Errol Louis, David Twersky, Hillel Halkin,
John McWhorter, Seth Gitell, Kenneth Blackwell, William F. Buckley
Jr., Cal Thomas, Nibras Kazimi, Rabbi Avi Shafran, R. Emmett Tyrrell
Jr., Anne Applebaum, Jacob Gershman, Amity Shlaes, John Stossel, David
Shribman, Thomas Bray, and the education critic Andrew Wolf.
Yet it was not only politics and commentary that animated the paper,
but also its arts coverage, which developed into a freestanding
section that many felt was the best in the city, and featured some of
the finest critics writing in America today, including Adam Kirsch, an
associate editor of the paper who wrote on literature, Lance Esplund
and David Cohen on art, Jay Nordlinger and Fred Kirshnit on classical
music, Eric Grode on theater, Joel Lobenthal on dance, Gary Giddins
and Brendan Bernhard on popular culture, and Bruce Bennett on film.
The Sun grew from its slim first issues, in part on the encouragement
of Conrad Black, whose Hollinger International was an investor in the
paper at the beginning, and who envisioned the paper as a stand-alone
first-read for sophisticated New Yorkers. It came to encompass a new
kind of sports page, with highly analytical coverage exemplified by
Tim Marchman on baseball, John Hollinger on basketball, and Tom
Perrotta on tennis. When the new online sports editor of the Wall
Street Journal, Adam Thompson, was named, he cited the Sun as having
the kind of coverage he wanted to emulate, for what he called a
"thinking man's sports site." Business and real estate coverage was
also beefed up and included columns by Dan Dorfman, Liz Peek, and
Michael Stoler under the direction of David Lombino and then Julie
Satow.
Another area in which the Sun broke ground was in its coverage of the
myriad events around town designed to raise money for the charities
that are such an important part of the city. The paper's society
editor, Amanda Gordon, became enough of a celebrity herself, as she
moved from event to event, that when a party was thrown in honor of
the fifth year of her column, "Out and About," scores of people she
covered showed up to express their appreciation.
When the paper was launched, a reporter of the Washington Post had
asked its editor, Seth Lipsky, how the Sun would be able to compete
against the New York Times, which had "eighty reporters" on its
metropolitan desk. The Times might have 80 reporters, he replied, but
they missed the story that taxes are too high, that the reason there
is an apartment shortage is rent control, and that vouchers are a
movement to rescue minority children from failing schools.
The original New York Sun was founded in 1833 by Benjamin Day. The
paper sold for a penny and represented the start of the modern, mass-
circulation newspaper business. The Sun was built to greatness from
the 1860s by Charles Dana, an editor who was fired by Horace Greeley's
Tribune for being not only willing but eager to fight a war against
slavery. Dana was named by Lincoln assistant secretary of war and rode
with U.S. Grant before returning to New York to acquire and edit the
Sun.
The original Sun's most famous monument was the "Yes, Virginia, there
is a Santa Claus" letter. The paper was published until January 3,
1950, when it was sold to Roy Howard, who merged it into what became
the World-Telegram and Sun. That newspaper became a casualty of the
newspaper die-off of the 1960s, which left the city with three general-
interest, citywide dailies: the News, the Post, and the Times.
Flash-forward to September 11, 2001, when Mr. Lipsky, who together
with Mr. Stoll had spent the last year raising capital to launch a new
daily, was setting out from breakfast in Midtown to a meeting at a law
firm where the final papers would be signed. As he left breakfast, his
secretary called from the New Jersey Turnpike to say that if he was
thinking of going later to his office at the Wall Street Journal, he
shouldn't, for a plane had just crashed into the World Trade Center.
Mr. Lipsky later said that he was humbled and inspired by the fact
that, for all the horror of the day and the chaos that followed, not
one of the investors who had committed capital to the Sun asked to
pull out. Less than six months later, on April 16, 2002, the first
issue of the newspaper hit the streets, 18 pages priced at 50 cents.
The lead story was an interview with Ahmad Chalabi, identified as "the
leader of the free, democratic Iraqi opposition." Mr. Chalabi warned
that the Bush administration's planning for a post-invasion Iraq was
"abysmal."
The interview, a major scoop, was often cited by those who suggested
the Sun was an uncritical supporter of the decision to go to ground in
Iraq.
More harbingers from that first front page: an interview with Lech
Walesa by Peggy Noonan; political reporting by Ben Smith at City Hall
and William F. Hammond Jr. in Albany; a quirky feature on big shots in
business who refused to part with their Rolodexes despite the digital
age, and an Associated Press dispatch headlined "Ant Colony Largest
Ever / 3,600 Miles of Cooperation." Mr. Lipsky wanted to have a quirky
animal story tucked somewhere on page 1 each day but soon, according
to one wag, came to his senses, and the feature was dropped.
Inside was the start of what would become, under a succession of
editors starting with Robert Messenger and then Robert Asahina and Pia
Catton, the liveliest art section in New York, written by a
combination of long-established critics and rising young voices. Mr.
Lipsky credited the paper's publisher between 2005 and 2008, Ronald
Weintraub, with the decision to make Arts+ a separate, daily section.
The decision was greeted with enthusiasm by both readers and
advertisers.
There was also a robust listings section, and the first of the new
series of Sun crosswords. Beside the puzzle in the first issue was the
solution to the previous New York Sun crossword, from January 4, 1950.
Innovative and playful, the Sun's new crosswords, edited by Peter
Gordon, were anthologized in bound collections and recognized in an
article in the Weekly Standard as the best puzzles in the country.
Inside the Chambers Street newsroom, just a block from the original
Sun offices across from City Hall, spirits ran high. A tiny crew — a
handful of reporters and one photographer at the start — cranked out
the paper every weekday. Prospective news assistants were asked if
they had driver's licenses because, the managing editor explained,
they might be called upon to drive the newspaper's delivery trucks.
The paper marked the 150th anniversary of the decision to create
Central Park with an editorial correcting the original New York Sun's
opposition to the plan.
Several of the staff had followed Mr. Lipsky to the Sun from the
Forward, an English-language version that Mr. Lipsky had launched in
1990 of the venerable Yiddish paper.
The Sun's offices, in an 1857 cast-iron building on the National
Register of Historic Places, often had amenities harking back to the
19th century. Desk fans in the summer gave way to space heaters in
winter. A Sun graphic designer recalled being offered a dram of
whiskey for warmth at a particularly frigid editorial meeting by none
other than Sir Harold Evans.
Sir Harold, former editor of the Times of London and husband to Sun
columnist Tina Brown, did a two-week stint as guest editor of the Sun.
He had made the acquaintance of the editor when he stopped by the
offices as the paper was preparing to launch and made what Mr. Lipsky
calls "a memorable act of journalistic one-upsmanship." Mr. Lipsky had
escorted Mr. Evans into the newsroom to see the mock-ups of the front
page, which were hanging on the wall at the far end of the newsroom.
As he approached, Sir Harold suddenly stopped, and, from about 2 yards
away, exclaimed: "I see you're using Times Europa for your body type."
Mr. Lipsky nodded and said, "I've always liked that font." Replied Sir
Harold: "I was chairman of the committee that designed that font."
Eventually, the Sun went to a more modern design, created by a famed
newspaper designer, Lucie Lacava, and implemented by art director
Kristofer Porter, that used the Chronicle family of type for headlines
and body and Vonnes for sans serif headlines.
Unlike most newspaper offices, the Sun's eschewed cubicles for metal
tables. The motive may have been financial, but the effect was to
increase sight lines and interactions among the youngish staff. As the
Sun's circulation rose, eventually in a combination of paid,
controlled, and sampled copies, to about 100,000 copies daily, a
parade of dignitaries began visiting the Sun's offices, including the
head of the archdiocese of New York, Edward Cardinal Egan; the
district attorney of New York County, Robert Morgenthau, and the
deputy prime minister of Israel, Natan Sharansky, as well as Mr.
Chalabi. Governor Cuomo, whom the Sun's editor had met in the living
room of conservative columnist William F. Buckley Jr., was an early
guest, as was C. Virginia Fields, then the president of Manhattan.
(Sun style outlawed the phrase "borough president.") Buckley was an
enormous fan of the Sun, and withdrew his column from the New York
Post to run it in the Sun, where it appeared every week until the
great columnist's death.
Less prominent visitors came by, too, including at one point a wizard
in full regalia who'd heard that the newspaper had a reporter who
specialized in legerdemain and other arcana. It did.
During the blackout of August 14, 2003, reporters feverishly put the
Sun together on laptops with fading batteries, illuminating their
notes with flashlights. The paper came out as usual the next day, 12
pages in full color with a photo of the Statue of Liberty half-
illuminated against a darkened Battery Park. The effort was
spearheaded by Mr. Stoll and the paper's news editor at the time,
Stuart Marques. Mr. Lipsky was on vacation in Maine, and later told
someone he'd never doubted they'd manage, so he'd gone swimming.
The Sun's coverage began to be noted from its earliest issues, when,
among other stories, it reported that some of the leaders of the
Queens Democratic Party lived in mansions outside the city; Mayor
Bloomberg was irked when the paper scooped his announcement of the
city's annual report card; Jack Newfield and Colin Miner played a
leading role in exposing the Brooklyn Democratic Party boss Clarence
Norman, who eventually went to prison. It was one of Newfield's last
crusades. He died December 20, 2004, not long after publishing a self-
interview on the Sun's front page.
Despite the presence of storied writers in its pages, the Sun
sometimes had to strive for recognition. At the 2004 Republican
National Convention, the Sun's California-based national
correspondent, Josh Gerstein, was stopped by security at an event and
asked which newspaper he worked for. When he explained, the police
phoned the newspaper and reached a receptionist, who, when asked
whether the paper had a California bureau, responded no. Mr. Gerstein
was promptly arrested and held for some hours until the confusion was
sorted out, him no worse for the wear.
Stories from abroad were part of the mix as well, and the Sun was
among the early American outlets to send a reporting team — Dina
Temple-Raston and photographer Konrad Fiedler — to Darfur. Sun
correspondents, including Adam Daifallah and Eli Lake, did turns in
Iraq, as well.
The Sun, which had an aversion to the nanny state, opposed the mayor's
campaign to ban indoor smoking and regulate trans fats, a campaign it
ridiculed in an editorial called "Bloomberg Fries."
Other newspapers and magazines, some perhaps annoyed at being scooped,
turned to the Sun as a recruiting ground and hired numerous Sun
reporters and editors. Seth Mnookin, Rachel Donadio, Robert Messenger,
and Jeremy McCarter were among the names lost to other papers. Yet the
Sun never lacked for applicants, especially interns from top-ranked
colleges eager to score a byline in the most exciting newspaper market
in the country. Some of the paper's most important contributors
rarely, if ever, got bylines: A deputy managing editor, John Seeley,
and the night editor, Martha Mercer, who was later promoted to day
editor, worked with a small team of copy editors and page designers to
produce the paper night after night.
Mr. Bloomberg had been skeptical at the start, but in 2004, he stopped
by the offices of the Sun to proclaim April 16 "New York Sun Day" in
New York City. Yesterday, he greeted the news of the paper's decision
to cease publication with a statement that called the paper's writers
"smart, thoughtful, provocative — and sometimes even courageous." Said
the mayor: "In a City saturated with news coverage and commentary, The
Sun shone brightly, though too briefly."
Brad Ferguson
<d449ecaa-a023-438a...@l42g2000hsc.googlegroups.com>,
hyfler/rosner <amelia...@gmail.com> wrote:
> There was also a robust listings section, and the first of the new
> series of Sun crosswords. Beside the puzzle in the first issue was the
> solution to the previous New York Sun crossword, from January 4, 1950.
Love that.
hyfler/rosner
> In article
> <d449ecaa-a023-438a-bab2-6d632b6f2...@l42g2000hsc.googlegroups.com>,
>
> hyfler/rosner <amelia.ros...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > There was also a robust listings section, and the first of the new
> > series of Sun crosswords. Beside the puzzle in the first issue was the
> > solution to the previous New York Sun crossword, from January 4, 1950.
>
> Love that.
Wow. Me, too.
Steve, you did a wonderful job, both over the years and with this last
obituary.
Louis Epstein
But to be honest...did a solution to that puzzle appear in the first
New York World Telegram and Sun in January 1950?
(I wonder if Scripps-Howard provided a solution to the last puzzle
in the World Journal Tribune).
-=-=-
The World Trade Center towers MUST rise again,
at least as tall as before...or terror has triumphed.