We're told the New York Sun—the right-leaning pro-Israel daily newspaper that was more or less doomed by the final, complete death of East Coast intellectual conservatism (thanks, Bush administration!)—will cease publication after all, with a final issue running on Monday. Probably. Former and current Sun staffers are invited to confirm/deny.
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!
♦ The Emmy Awards will take place on Sunday evening; AMC's Mad Men is the "overwhelming favorite" to win for best drama series. [Reuters]
♦ What's happening with the New York Sun, which said it will shut down on September 29th without additional funding? It's a "very fluid situation," according to Ira Stoll. [Portfolio]
♦ Tina Fey's SNL imitation of Sarah Palin earned NBC its most-watched web clip in history. [THR]
♦ According to a new research study, Survivor is the most addictive show on TV. [NYP]
♦ MSNBC is expanding to India and Indonesia, among other places. [THR]
♦ The founders of Dreamworks have sealed their pact India's Reliance, a deal that will provide them with $1.2 billion to set up a new film company. [WSJ]
The Sun may fold at the end of the month if it doesn't raise additional capital. But the paper has plenty of people who are voicing support! Among those recruited to give the neo-con paper a positive blurb today: Michael Bloomberg, Edward Egan, Glenn Lowry, Paul LeClerc, Herbert Pardes, Randi Weingarten, William Thompson, Betsy Gotbaum, Scott Stringer,Christine Quinn, and Robert Morgenthau. Now if just each of those people got one friend to pay for a subscription, they'd be in business. [NYSun]
A select group of New York's "most discerning readers" have been invited to receive a free, one-year, no strings attached subscription to the failing, soon-to-be-nonexistent New York Sun! Their marketing department's belief that a taste of the Sun will cause you to "spread the word about our rare journalistic and literary excellence" is sort of funny but more sad. This is possibly the least valuable free offer of all time. The full exciting letter, below:
Last night, word emerged that The Sun, the right-leaning daily founded by Ira Stoll and Seth Lipsky in 2002, may end up shutting down at the end of the month if the company doesn't find additional investors willing to step in. The Sun has had financial problems since day one and it never made much headway in the circulation department. This time, though, it looks like it could be the end of the line: The paper even posted an account of its problems on its website. (Perhaps in the hope that another super-conservative, Jewish billionaire will turn up with his checkbook.) So why are the Sun's current backers—including Bruce Kovner, Tom Tisch, and Michael Steinhardt, left—giving up? They've got plenty of other stuff to worry about, that's why.
"I mean, just, the conservative elites ... it's actually an intellectual blockage ... that keeps them from supporting this stuff." That is National Review editor Ramesh Ponnuru enlightening today's Observer as to why conservative lobbyists don't promote his "pro-growth pro-family" tax initiatives, but why don't we just get hacky and apply it to another sad development for thinking conservatives broken today by the Observer: the New York Sun, a conservative New York daily that secured its initial funding in 2001 from a hodgepodge of investors united most visibly by an abiding love for Israel, has announced it will close at the end of the month unless it secures new funding.Many things have changed since the Sun was founded: lead investor and Chicago Sun-Times owner Conrad Black went to jail, oil went above $100 a barrel, Israel went to war with Lebanon, Bill Buckley died and someone named "Julia Allison" gave birth to something called "microcelebrity," and the embarrassing unbridled jingoism unleashed by the events of September 11 greased the proverbial wheels of a prodigious bounty of lousy deals that would result mainly in death and disillusionment, the latter of which would eventually, mercifully, find itself directed at the Republican Party and the conservative movement that, in addition to God, granted it so much power. But here is what has not changed: conservatives do not really read, which is to say, of course conservatives read but not things that are like, long*, and those who do tend to compartmentalize the pastime as something rather far removed from their ideology, and if that's not the case, well, they would seem to be sufficiently alarmed by the defilement of their once-optimistic "movement" to be directing their information demands at suppliers of cruder, less ideologically-refined sources than the Sun. Of course, this is all blather and speculation; I am merely stating what I believe to be the nature of business conditions in the niche. But it is not just the Rupert Murdochs of the conservative media ideologically softening these days; the nuttycon Washington Times would seem to be on a bid to "mainstream" itself, while the talking heads and bloggingheads running such outlets as the National Review seem primarily to be brokering in new cute phrases: Sam's Club Republicans! The Sourpuss Vote! We've been Palinized! We think you'll agree, if there's anything the industry needs right now, it's de-Palinization.
The New York Post reports that local broadsheet the New York Sun is doomed. Their investors have lost money for more than 6 years on what was always basically a vanity paper for right-leaning ultra-hawkish pro-Israel New Yorkers, and they've given founder Seth Lipsky a month to line up new funders. The Sun will reportedly announce something—the end?—on their website in just a minute. Leaving aside their insane editorial page and wacky style guide, the Sun did have some of the best arts coverage of all the New York dailies and a good local section. (And, you know, Lenore Skenazy and John McWhorter.) So, like, sad. Right? Without a Murdoch or a Reverend Moon, it's almost like a hilariously right-wing daily can't make it in this crazy mixed-up world. Update: The statement.
Sure, internships are supposed to be tough, but the rabid neoconservatives who run the New York Sun seem to be going out of their way to be severe to the unfortunate young souls who somehow find themselves paying their dues there. The dress code, for example, stipulates not only a suit and tie but a specific color of shirt, shine to the shoe and knotting of neckwear. Is this really the paper that celebrated Middle Eastern women who defiantly wear tight jeans, bikinis and punk-rock-inspired clothes under their burkas in the name of not being "dressed like everybody else?" And is the de facto ban on subway rides of more than 30 minutes coming from the same editors who slammed the mayor for taxing suburban commuters? Apparently so! Whether there's hypocrisy at work in them or not, the Sun's "Guidelines For Interns" are pretty hilarious, assuming you don't have to slave under them. Someone who did just sent us a copy, and we've highlighted some of the fun bits:
In the market for an 18-karat gold iPhone? How about a diamond-encrusted cell with a screen made of sapphire crystals? No? That's probably because you're not Lacey Tisch. The daughter of Loews co-chairman (and billionaire) Andrew Tisch, Lacey took time to expound on the subject for the Sun today, suggesting that consumers are sick of cell phones that simply function. What they really want are luxury models from Prada, Giorgio Armani, and Bang & Olufsen: "What else are you going to put in your $15,000 Birkin bag? Not the latest free phone from Verizon, that's for sure."
Are you one of the apologist types who argues that not all hip hop music is ignorant, antisocial filth? Please excuse New York Sun columnist and bizarre racial thinker John McWhorter as he shakes his head in exasperation at your foolish "fallacy." Did you know that the urban black demographic has problems with crime and education? Let's hear you defend your precious "conscious" rap now! How does the irredeemable evil of all rap music ever recorded logically follow from the existence of social problems? John McWhorter will tell you how: with some terrifying lyrics from The Roots, proving that hip hop will be our generation's downfall:
Barack Obama made two moves recently that leave him open to charges of selling out. One, his selection of James Johnson to help select a running mate. Johnson is a former CEO of Fannie Mae, where he helped usher in the subprime lending crisis. Also he's a Bilderberg attendee! The other new hire, though, will surely upset many more liberal stalwarts: Obama named Jason Furman as his economic policy director. Furman is a former Clintonite economist who loooooooves giant retailer Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart, he says, is a boon to poor Americans, because their prices are so low. They keep their prices low, critics charge, by fucking over their non-union workforce and aiding the export of manufacturing jobs overseas, but Furman argued in a 2005 paper that consumers saved enough money shopping at the store to offset the impact on wages. Obama's never quite been a champion of organized labor, but this selection does throw him open to accusations of pretty blatant hypocrisy (hooray electoral politics!):
We talk all the time about how we hate your kids because they're spoiled and rich, taking over the city with their precious, organic ways! Now we have an ally in the media: Lenore Skenazy from the New York Sun. She wrote about leaving him at Bloomingdale's! "For weeks my boy had been begging for me to please leave him somewhere, anywhere, and let him try to figure out how to get home on his own. So on that sunny Sunday I gave him a subway map, a MetroCard, a $20 bill, and several quarters." It's like the Outward Bound of New York City! On the Today Show, mother and son explain his big adventure: "This is like, 'boy boils egg.' He just did something that any nine-year-old can do." Click to watch Skenazy get chastised: the subway is no place for children.
Even at a quarter, the New York Sun is tough sell. The paper is such a joke we don't even make it fun of it. At best, it's like an animal shelter for unemployed New York writers. But even if it's a bizarre Zionist vanity project, someone needs to move that paper. So it falls to the telemarketers to sell the paper's lies. A tipster sent a recording of the pitch. We've dutifully transcribed the absurd stuff, after the jump.
For those of us who have been wondering what it means to be "really black," John McWhorter is here with some impenetrable explanations. McWhorter is a scholar at the conservative Manhattan Institute and frequent phoner-in of columns to the New York Sun (seriously, today's is just him riffing on how much the play "Hairspray" sucks, for no apparent reason). In an essay on TheRoot.com, he takes on those backward-thinking idealists who reject the question of who is "black enough." What's McWhorter's groundbreaking formula for measuring blackness? Hint: It involves dance skills, Ebonics, and chicken!
It took a day or so, but the staid and conservative New York Sun basically became the Post today, with no fewer than six stories on your New York Football Giants. Including one by beloved former Daily News columnist Lenore Skenazy. She has never watched football before, but now she has some sort of meathead son who declares that upon growing up he's "going to be a linebacker, or safety, or maybe a hot dog seller, because he loves the tongs." Ok, little Skenazy! Whatever. Then Skenazy and her husband eat "wings" and watch their very first Super Bowl ever on a "spanking new high-def projector so we can watch the game on our living room wall. We take down our French poster for the occasion." Mon dieu! Not their "French poster"! Andrea Peyser would eat these people alive. [NYSun]
