• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, September 30, 2008

Today's edition of the New York Sun will be its last, editor Seth Lipsky told the newspaper's staff in a meeting yesterday afternoon. At the beginning of September, Lipsky had warned staff and readers that closure was imminent if the newspaper did not obtain new sources of funding soon.

Fittingly, the announcement of the paper's demise coincided with the worst single one-day drop in the New York Stock Exchange in over two decades, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average down 777 points.

The New York Sun, a rare newcomer to the print newspaper business, held out hope that the medium could continue to thrive if publishers and editors adopted innovative strategies. In the case of the Sun, this included adopting an unapologetic right-wing stance intended to appeal to readers who were dissatisfied with the perceived liberal bias of established dailies like The New York Times.

The newspaper was launched by conservative investors in 2002, taking the name of a venerable city paper that closed in 1950 after a merger with the now-defunct New York World-Telegram. Despite its strident opinions, the paper attracted admirers from all over the political spectrum. On Tuesday, the newspaper's Web site quoted Anthony Weiner, a liberal Democrat, praising the paper's international reporting:

"Now, you might be thinking, well, this must be a newspaper that's been particularly kind to my point of view. Maybe the editorial page has been particularly kind to the values that I share. And very often, if not most of the time, I disagree with their editorial page. But it is always erudite and thorough, and gives us a great deal to think about."

The paper also earned respect for the high quality of its (less ideological) reporting on sports and culture.

The New York Sun certainly is not alone in its financial woes -- leaving behind a business whose future looks increasingly dim, at least for big metro dailies.

According to the Newspaper Association of America, revenues have declined for eight straight quarters in year-over-year comparisons, and the losses appear to be accelerating: after a second-quarter drop of 8.4% last year, newspapers fell an additional 15% in the second quarter of this year. In actual dollar terms, second-quarter revenues have tumbled from $12.36 billion in 2006 to $9.6 billion, shedding a little over $2.75 billion.