The conservative newspaper The New York Sun has closed down after six and a half years of operations, during which it lost an estimated $80 million. Several Wall Street investors had been willing to finance the paper at a loss in order to bring an explicitly right-of-center voice to the New York City news media, with assurances that the paper would ultimately become profitable, but in recent months the losses had become too big to be borne. The declining stock market and inability of the paper to build a strong paid circulation base ultimately doomed the effort. The most serious miscalculation on the publishers’ part was probably in trying to create a new newspaper at a time when newspapers are dying out. It was like trying to open a horse-buggy company just after the invention of the Model T. Thus the paper’s end has nothing to do with its conservative editorial stance and everything to do with the dying out of the newspaper industry.
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