Before fatherhood ate up large chunks of my time, I wrote pretty regularly for The New York Sun’s op-ed page, and once in a while for their news pages from Turkey. The demise of the Sun is some of the worst news about journalism to come down the pike in a long, long time.
Eli Lake and Russell Berman did some first-rate reporting on foreign affairs and the Washington political scene. As editors, Ira Stoll and Nicholas Wapshott had some of the lightest editing hands I’ve ever worked with. The one time I visited the office, it was buzzing exactly the way a great New York newsroom ought to. You half expected to see J. Jonah Jameson bellowing at Peter Parker. (In fact, the closing scene of The Devil Wears Prada was filmed in the Sun’s newsroom.)
Everyone I dealt with there knew the high odds against them, the refreshingly offbeat idea of a high-end, intellectual, right-of-center newspaper for the New York audience. (The New York Post is great, classic tabloid, but there ought to be room in NYC journalism for a right-of-center broadsheet aiming for a higher-end demographic.) The endeavor was, in fact, a display of the audacity of hope. The Sun deserved to be an institution.