REPORT: Notes From Publisher’s Roundtable with Seth Lipsky of The New York Sun
Many thanks to Ariel Brewster, J2006, for sharing these notes from the recent lunch with Seth Lipsky of The New York Sun.
Notes From A Publisher’s Roundtable with Seth Lipsky of The New York Sun
By Ariel Brewster, J2006
aeb2133[at]columbia.edu
New York Sun publisher Seth Lipsky came to talk about the management side of journalism during a Publisher’s Roundtable discussion with students at the Columbia Journalism School on Wednesday, May 3, 2006.
Lipsky founded the New York Sun four years ago, and was the editor of The Forward for 10 years. Lipsky started his career as a stringer for Time Magazine when he was a student at Harvard, and was offered a position there after graduation, but turned it down to go work for the Anniston Star in Alabama during the Civil Rights movement. He was then drafted and spent two years in the Army, working first for the Army Digest and then for Stars and Stripes as a combat reporter in Vietnam. He then worked for the Wall Street Journal, launching both their Europe and Asia editions.
The New York Sun was launched in April 2002 with a circulation of 20,000. Ads are growing at a rate of 58% a year, but the paper is still losing about $1 million a month, Lipsky said. (The NY Post loses about $20-70 million a year, he said.) Lipsky said that his 21 investors don’t care that they’re losing money — they “just want a good newspaper for this town.” But, he said,
“our goal is profitable publication of a newspaper and we are working our way toward it.”
The Sun was originally sold for 25 cents at the newsstand, but advertisers thought that was “chintzy,” so the paper upped the price to 50 cents, and it may increase to $1 sometime in the near future, Lipsky said.
The Sun’s website has 580,000 unique visitors per month and 4 million page views per month. The site is now free, but Lipsky predicted that they may start charging for archives and some material (with something similar to TimesSelect).
Lipsky described himself as a Democrat with some Reaganite politics. When asked about the cultural and political ideals with which he founded the New York Sun, Lipsky listed his and his paper’s beliefs: pro-labor, a limited but honest government, strong foreign policy, constitutionality, and low taxes, among others.
Lipsky talked about the entrepreneurial element of his personality. Despite what his investors may think, he joked, he considers himself a decent businessman (He once even tried to get an ad salesman position at the WSJ, but was turned down). He compared the newspaper business to high-low poker and referred to spreadsheets as “just the dipstick.” You’re either all guilty or all innocent when it comes to decisions and divisions of news coverage and editorial content, Lipsky said.
Students asked Lipsky how he knows when the time is right to start up a new paper. Lipsky answered that he looks for a story big enough to start that paper; in Asia it was capitalism and communism, in Europe it was the climactic years of the Cold War, and in New York with The Forward in 1991 it was, he said, a “moment” in Jewish identity after the anti-Semitic riots in Crown Heights.
With the Sun, Lipsky thought the NY Times was becoming too national, giving national advertisers preference and relegating local stories to the Metro section. So Lipsky saw an opening the market and they launched the Sun with the slogan, “New York on Page One.” But the Times editors quickly countered by moving one B1 story onto A1 with an easy (and at no cost) click of the mouse. So the Sun built up its Washington efforts and started doing more national and international stories. Lipsky thinks that lots of people who love the NY Times still want another paper, and focus groups confirm this. (Dean Lemann then pointed out that one of Lipsky’s business partners used to run SmarterTimes.com, a daily critique of the Times, that now redirects to NYSun.com).
Lipsky also said that he thinks there’s nothing wrong with a paper having a few “pet issues.” At the Sun, the include the Columbia Middle East professor controversy, the debate over eminent domain and allegations of corruption at the United Nations. Lipsky pointed out that in the 1800s the New York Tribune organized, armed, and sent New Yorkers to settle in Kansas during the slavery issue, and he sees nothing wrong with that. That was an era of ascendant newspapers, and he’s worried that now we’re in an era of descendant newspapers. We shouldn’t be worried about Chinese walls. In fact, Lipsky said that he always asks reporters what their politics are, but has never rejected a job applicant because of their politics. He likes candidates to have politics, and to be excited about issues. Lipsky observed that his staff is, in fact, “fairly diverse.”
Both Lipsky’s most recent papers have had good arts coverage and culture sections, he noted, which he attributes to the people he’s hired to run those parts of the paper. Lipsky himself paints every day, and has an interest in the arts (though he admits he knows nothing about sports).
When the group asked about the merits of working at a small, economically imperiled organization versus working at a more established place, Lipsky advised students to work at a smaller paper where you can get more bylines and do more. You can have enormous impact even with a small circulation, he said. Instead of inching up the career ladder at a big organization, he recommended going somewhere else and then “circling back in later.”
To close, Lipsky offered his best advice for younger journalists starting out: Learn grammar, he said, because it’s the foundation of all logic, and second, eschew careerism and go for the story.
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