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The Sun Also Rises
April 26, 2002
by John Bloom
NEW YORK, April 26 -- There can never be enough
newspapers in the world, which is why I was stunned, excited,
and, hell, grateful to hear that a bunch of crazy millionaires
were launching a New York daily in spite of all predictions of
their utter doom.
It's called the New York Sun, taking the name of the old
crusading penny paper that finally went out of business in 1950,
and when it was reborn two weeks ago, I told the guy at the
Yemeni deli on the corner to capture one for me on pain of death-
-because I'm a newspaper addict. I read at least six newspapers
before noon every day--the five New York dailies (now six) plus
the Washington Post--and I still look forward to Wednesdays, when
the Village Voice, the New York Observer and the New York Press
all pile up on top of the usual stack. If you count all the
papers I cadge in airports and hotels on the road, there are days
when my hands are caked in more black ink than an escaping squid.
That first day turned out to be a rocky one for the Sun. The
other papers either ignored it, dryly reported its existence,
damned it with the faint praise of a "noble effort," or, in one
case, jumped all over it for being ugly, boring and old-
fashioned. (You can always count on the New York Post to skewer
the first lamb of the season. Couldn't they at least have waited
till the second issue?)
The Sun turned out to be big, dense, and a little confusing
at first. It was not exactly full of breaking news. That first
day they had an interview with Lech Walesa, another one with the
leader of the "free, democratic Iraqi opposition," and a feature
on the demise of the metal Rolodex--yet nothing to say about the
coup and counter-revolution in Venezuela which occurred over the
three days prior to the issue. The opening editorial, which you
would expect to be a rousing statement of principle, was a kind
of generalized call for reform of local government. It was
obvious this was not going to be an easy paper to figure out.
But that's okay. Every newspaper, like every friend, has a
distinct personality, and while some can be divined immediately--
the brash, loud, wide-open types--others require some quality
time. Reading the New York Post, for example, is like having a
stand-up comic for a friend, but reading the New York Times is
like having a wheezy uncle who drones on and on in the most mind-
deadening way possible but you put up with him because he teaches
at the community college and people seem to trust him. The Wall
Street Journal is like sharing cocktails with a droll but over-
precise insurance salesman who can occasionally frighten you with
bursts of anger. The Daily News is the "How 'bout them Yankees?"
guy who sits next to you on the subway. Newsday is the
bespectacled guy in the next cubicle who seems to have a boring
life but can surprise you with his knowledge of arcane sixties
rock-and-roll trivia.
And the Sun? This is a tough one. I've pored over the first
two weeks of Suns, and even though it's a small paper--12 king-
size pages on most days--it's kind of daunting. It scares you a
little bit with its dense mix of micro-politics (welfare reform
anyone? redistricting? rent control? school budgets?), off-the-
beaten-track coverage of the Middle Eastern conflict (how about
the story of the Shiite Muslim dissident in Germany sentenced to
death by Iran and advised to go underground by the German
authorities? what does it all mean? I don't know!), and obsession
with the visual arts (Balthus anyone? Soho galleries? how about
the Montclair Art Museum in Montclair, New Jersey?).
In other words, it's not a real amusing paper. I won't say
they totally lack a sense of humor--they favor the quirky two-
paragraph feature on lost dogs and new insect species--but 99 per
cent of it is the kind of articles you have to brace yourself for. I'm not saying this is a bad thing. Given enough time, and
enough familiarity with its writers, it's possible to become
comfortable reading even The New York Review of Books, which may
be the densest prose experience since Proust described the
texture of his fingernails. But it's not the kind of thing you
want to do before breakfast.
There's not much interest in sports at the Sun, or hip hop,
or street crime, or cartoons (they don't even have political
cartoons). You can't really read the Sun on the subway, because
it's HUGE, a true broadsheet, so if you try to open it to turn
the page, you're likely to elbow somebody in the Adam's apple.
The front-page is full of traditional stacked headlines that are
not exactly attention-grabbers:
NEW HQ FOR BLOOMBERG L.P. EMBLEMATIC OF A NEW PROBLEM
The writing is a little livelier than the straightforward Times, but far less interesting than the wry correspondents of the Observer. They seem to be encouraging their reporters to take a point of view, in the 19th-century tradition that I personally love, but it's more often than not a timid point of view, lapsing quickly back into "just the facts, ma'am" mediaspeak. They tend to avoid the first person and don't have any real columnists, in the Jimmy Breslin or Pete Hamill sense.
It seems to me that a 12-page paper has to go for writing, writing and more writing. Any newshound is going to go elsewhere for the basic information of the day. The Sun has two or three pages a day filled with wire copy from the Associated Press, the Daily Telegraph of London, and the Jerusalem Post, but all that stuff is already available on New York newsstands. You get the impression that they're passionate about the paper but haven't yet let their passion erupt into its pages.
For example, they love to write about Israel and they love to write about art, but they haven't yet reviewed the most controversial art show in town, "Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art" at the Jewish Museum. The Post alone has printed dozens of articles on it, but you get the impression that these guys would have something interesting and new to say about it. Instead we have one whole page of book reviews you would normally consult for your graduate-school thesis--one about the history of Burma, followed by a first-person account of the Spanish-Moroccan war of the 1920s, then a Harvard University Press about American fiction from 1945 to 1970, and finally a Yale University Press philosophical essay called "At the End of an Age." Couldn't we have at least one Dean Koontz novel in there somewhere? (Suffice it to say, they completely ignored the opening of "Jason X.")
The Sun's daily calendar is full of egghead events like book readings, lectures and art-museum screenings, but it's not very practical because it lists only things that happen that day. Presumably you would need to study the paper at 6 a.m. so you could decide whether to catch that lecture on the history of Penn Station at noon, or the poetry panel at the Americas Society after work. If your idea of a good time is paying $45 to hear Charlie Rose moderate a panel on the media at Florence Gould Hall, then this is the paper for you!
The old Sun Building downtown at Broadway and Chambers streets has a famous clock and temperature gauge inscribed with the Sun's motto: "It Shines For All." The new Sun has incorporated the old logo and its motto, but so far doesn't seem to have its heart in it. This Sun shines for less than all-- certainly they don't go after the blue-collar reader or the commuter from New Jersey--and when it does emit bright rays, they seem directed at the Upper East Side, the downtown pols, and dedicated newshounds like myself. That's not a wide enough net for New York, which speaks 178 languages, includes every ethnic group known to man, and is the international center of specialized worlds like finance and dance performance and fashion that are barely touched on by the Sun.
I'll keep reading it no matter what, if only for its quirky take on issues no one else cares about, but at this point it's neither fish nor fowl--not specialized enough to be a "must read" like the weeklies (the Voice, the Observer) with their well- defined audiences, and not general enough to be a free-standing paper that you can read without looking elsewhere for more complete news coverage. I would like to see the Sun get bolder and brassier and tell me what it really means. Otherwise it's likely to get lost in the welter of New York voices, where everyone has an opinion and everyone is talking at once.
In other words, I'd like to see the Sun kick some ass, but do it at a higher level than the Queens Democratic committee.
© Copyright 2002 United Press International and John Bloom