The New York Sun slowly re-rises

Posted by Nestor Bailly on November 18, 2009 at 5:00 PM

The New York Sun, was once a conservative 5 day paper published in the NYC region from 2002-2008 and was intended to pick up on the New York Times' lack of local coverage. It stopped publication on September 30th 2008 due to financial devastation. The Sun once boasted a readership of 150,000, but only sold 13,000 copies a day while giving away over 85,000.

In any case, The NY Sun is back, albeit in an online-only form. To kick off the re-launch, president and editor-in-chief Seth Lipsky is introducing a 20-week run of crosswords from famous puzzle editor Peter Gordon at $1 a week/per puzzle. Lipsky intends to use this as a way to gauge whether there is significant interest in the news site and whether to invest more.

All the material that has been and will be added to the site, which is owned by Lipsky's Two SL LLC, can pay for itself (besides the occasional opinion pieces). What this exactly means is uncertain, and it will probably limit what the site can run.

At the moment nysun.com displays low-wealth ads and hosts about 64,000 monthly visitors who come to see society coverage, crosswords and foreign policy opinion.

Source: Nieman Journalism Labs