Right-leaning daily New York Sun has published its much-anticipated final issue Tuesday, succumbing to financial difficulties seven years after taking up the flag of a conservative paper of the prior two centuries. A Zionist publication founded by a breakaway faction from the Forward, the Sun ended its run at the start of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. It can't be said that the newspaper expected anything other than an uphill battle for survival. The creation of the Sun organization was delayed by the attacks of September 11, 2001 and came at a time when newspapers were already viewed as an endangered species. Losses mounted; if the conservative movement's identity crisis didn't doom the Sun, the Wall Street meltdown certainly did. Despite a 60 percent advertising spike in the paper's final month and a 25 percent increase this year, the paper could not find new investors, editor and co-founder Seth Lipsky told staff in comments reprinted in today's paper. The final issue revels in recent praise for the paper, its hard-won scoops and the peculiar moments one might expect amid such a quixotic effort. Some excerpts are after the jump.

The demise of the (surprisingly beloved [in death, anyway]) conservative daily New York Sun has been reported by us and others a hundred times now. Supposedly this is it for real. Editor Seth Lipsky just made a speech in the Sun's newsroom and tomorrow is the last edition, according to our source. It was supposed to be today, but they held out for a day. Of course then the bailout bill collapsed and the Dow plunged 777 points (!!) and maybe investors aren't so much interested in niche newspapers right now. If you have any details on Lipsky's speech or contributed your remembrances to tomorrow's edition, feel free to share in the comments.

Wow, this is a proud mark of the global influence of the financially puny New York Times: a story it did in June has prompted one of the world's richest men to sue his own brother for more than $2 billion. Awesome! Anil Ambani says that his brother Mukesh (they each inherited half of the massive Indian conglomerate Reliance) smeared his good name in the Times, so he had no choice but to sue him, the Times, and two Indian papers for 100 billion rupees. Here's the offending passage that set him off:

Creative Loafing, the conglomerate that owns the alt-weeklies in DC, Atlanta, Chicago, and several other cities, has filed for bankruptcy. The company has more than $40 million of debt, a number exacerbated by its purchases of the Chicago Reader and Washington City Paper last year. This may be just a foreshadowing of some painful days to come for alt-weeklies in general—we also hear the Village Voice may be on the verge of some layoffs. Creative Loafing CEO Ben Eason tried to put a positive spin on the move as one that will allow the company to reorganize safely without hurting quality:

The New York Times ran a huge (huge!) A1 investigative piece on John McCain and his weird gambling obsession and ties to the Indian Casino industry and Vegas and lobbyists and ten thousand other things yesterday. It was well-reported, historical in focus, and fair. It ran on the front page of the Sunday edition, which reaches almost half a million more readers than the weekday edition. But, you know, no one is talking about it. It didn't really stick! Did anyone read the whole thing? Were there bombshells? Who knows! What happened? The Times sabotaged itself, either intentionally or through ineptitude. Allow us to explain. Times editor Bill Keller complains a lot these days about how no one pays enough attention to the Times and their big stories. He blames the internet and a million competing voices for distracting people from the Important Work of Times journalists. He's sorta right! Gone are the days when the Times set the agenda for the national press. Though the slow death of newspapers across the nation has been beneficial to the Times in one important way: they're the only national paper, effectively. A Times investigation reaches more of the country than a Washington Post investigation. So one would expect a story of this size and seeming heft would make a big splash. But it didn't! Drudge didn't play it up—though as we move closer to the election, he regresses even more to his natural Republican hackdom, so they shouldn't have expected a push from him. And the liberals have no one coherent answer to Drudge, just a million sites trying desperately to push their own often competing agendas. Kos, Talking Points Memo, and the Huffington Post all share an elitist coastal liberal bias and huge audiences, but very different methods of achieving their goals and working the media refs. But on the other hand... the way the Times dropped the story seems self-defeating. Front page of the Sunday edition, sure. But it went online Saturday night. So by the time Monday morning rolls around, it seems ancient, even though no one actually talked about it over the weekend. Furthermore, it came right after a presidential debate, right before a hugely anticipated vice presidential debate, and right in the midst of a gigantic economic crisis and a desperate attempt by Congress to prevent another Great Depression. The Times should've had the story go live online on Thursday night (in time for it to be an issue in the debates!), they should've leaked salient details to Drudge beforehand, or they should've waited until the bailout negotiations collapsed or succeeded. The fact that they did none of those things indicates to us that they didn't actually want this story to blow up. Maybe there's nothing actually to it (though the bit where McCain helped take down Jack Abramoff because he was the competition to McCain's preferred lobbyists seems a bit juicy, right?) or maybe they've actually been cowed by the McCain campaigns attacks on their credibility, or maybe they just don't know what the hell they're doing. Now, for your edification, some interesting bits from the 100-page Times piece on John McCain's gambling addiction:

We're told a New York Sun editor emailed freelancers to tell them tomorrow will, indeed, see publication of the neoconservative daily's last issue, as previously rumored. At the start of this month, the newspaper said it was desperately seeking cash. It supposedly raised "a lot" of money in the following two weeks, but then came a brutal Wall Street meltdown that appears to have ended any hope for new benefactors. The Sun editor's brief email, forwarded by a tipster, is after the jump.

Victory! Earlier, we argued that newspapers should stop slumming as blogs and disallow comments on their websites. Now, at least the Maui News has. "Dear readers," the letter from the publisher begins. "Due to flagrant abuse of the privilege—including continual name-calling, crude language, profanity, slander, threats and racism—the Maui News will no longer allow comments to be posted on its Web site... the volume, frequency and vileness of the abusers' postings have grown beyond the newspaper's capacity to remove them in a timely manner." If readers can't handle nice things, they will be taken away! [Maui News via Romenesko]

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.

The Daily News is locked in a cutthroat tabloid war with the New York Post. The winner won't be determined by journalistic quality, obviously. No, it's all about stunts! Gotta bring in those eyeballs. So the Daily News hired a Sarah Palin lookalike and taped her walking around Manhattan, fooling the hell out of clueless (likely) Daily News readers! One guy has her sign a hockey puck. Then she tries to go to NBC and see Tina Fey but is kicked out. I see it as a parable of media domination of our political discourse. Watch the full clip after the jump, and then please stop sending us Sarah Palin Gawker Stalkers: Click to view

Oh god that New York Times social networking thing is live, for everyone(?), and it's popping up on top of everything we're trying to read. Go away! We don't want to join TimesPeople, a network of Times readers. Honestly the last thing the internet needs is another method of forwarding Krugman columns to people who already fucking read them. [PaidContent]

What does it take to get American editorial pages honest-to-God riled up about something? In addition to the expected criticism from the left, Hank Paulson's $700 billion bank bailout has been savaged by no less a conservative than Newt Gingrich, who wrote, "we’re using the taxpayers’ money to hire people to save their friends with even more taxpayer money." Among the more strenuous Congressional opponents is the Republican senator from Alabama who chairs the Senate banking committee and said he worries the bailout "is neither workable nor comprehensive despite its enormous price tag." The Monday plunge in the dollar and U.S. stocks was widely seen as rendering judgement on the cost and effectiveness of the plan, unveiled over the weekend. And yet, save for some quibbling about oversight, the Times' Tuesday editorial on the matter treats the bailout as a given:

Robert Fisk is a legendary Middle East reporter for The Independent and has been called "the most famous foreign correspondent in Britain." But he has that unfortunate angry-old-man attitude about the internet. At a recent lecture, "He recalled being challenged about a quote of his that had been published on a website - although he had never said it. 'But I read it on the internet,' was the response, to which Mr Fisk simply hung up." Reasonable! But what would you expect from a guy who has an entire method of online rhetorical smacking-down named after him?

When, back in April, we wondered what exactly political newspaper/website Politico was up to (and do they make money?) we said this: "once the presidential thing is done, Politico will have to go back to what we thought it'd be in the first place-a wonkish, Roll Call-like little trade paper for Congress-watchers and DC insiders." Because pure politics does not make money, and Politico has a lot of big salaries to pay. But Politico didn't listen! Once the election is over, The Times reports (from their new media desk!), Politico will expand! And then the Washington Post will copy them!

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 Post is so unimpressed with the new season of Heroes, the show that "was once so thrilling and fun, has become full of itself, its characters spouting crazy nonsense." Like this:

In July, when Richard Fuld was blaming rumormongers and short-sellers for troubles as Lehman Brothers, the Times ran a column by finance writer Andrew Ross Sorkin echoing his complaints and calling one of the rumors, that Barclays would acquire Lehman, "absurd." Today, with Barclays buying Lehman's U.S. operations, the Times is still siding with investment banks over investors, depositors and others who benefit from the free flow of information. Here's some data the paper won't be providing about the mess on Wall Street, according to an article it published today:

The bad news: advertising revenue at New York Times newspapers fell 15.9% in the year to August. The good news: the dip wasn't quite as cataclysmic as July's.

Gnomish Tribune CEO Sam Zell has finally deigned to respond to the fact that his own current and former employees at the LA Times filed a lawsuit against him two days ago for, essentially, making Tribune suck. We imagine Zell spent a full day throwing things around his office and carving "F.U!" in his desk with a pen knife before he calmed down enough to make a statement. Though he couldn't help but include the fact that he's outraged, absolutely outraged, at the (motherfuckers) who filed this suit. Read Zell's seething statement after the jump:

It's the nature of the media business to take profits from the suffering of others, and coverage of the recent financial meltdown is no exception, helping to drive online traffic and (no doubt) newsstand sales. But the Wall Street Journal should be more discreet about its gloating, particularly given the newspaper will soon eject 50 of its own staff into the economic wilderness now home to the likes of Lehman Brothers. At least one Journal staffer was none too pleased to see an internal news item today headlined "Market Turmoil Provides Hook to Sell U.S. Journal in London." (It's reprinted in full after the jump.)

The time has finally come for Steve Dunleavy—the problem-drinking right wing New York Post columnist who's been called "[Rupert] Murdoch's fiercest, most loyal and longest-running attack dog"—to officially hang it up. The Post is throwing him a retirement party October 1 (click to enlarge the official invite!), putting a -30- on a career that really wound down months ago due to health problems. They don't make 'em like him any more! Is what you say about guys like this. Let's take a fond(ish) look back at the life of "The Prince of Darkness," an angry tabloid legend: Dunleavy was born in Sydney, Australia in 1938. He moved to New York as a stringer in the mid-1960s, and made his way to the Post after Rupert Murdoch bought it in the late 1970s. In 1977 he found time to publish a book called "Elvis- What happened?", a behind-the-scenes look at the life of The King that came out just weeks before Elvis died. Hm. In the 80s Dunleavy was a lead reporter on A Current Affair, the Post of television.