Media Mogul and a New Sun Rise in N.Y.

This morning, in the predawn hours, millions of pages were sorted, tied, trucked and heaved to the pavement beside thousands of newsstands and apartments buildings in New York City. There was the usual trio of papers that divide the city demographically: the tabs--the Daily News and New York Post--that litter the subways by 9, and the broadsheet New York Times that doormen deposit along rows of high-rise corridors. But this morning, for the first time in years, there is a new addition, a second broadsheet, stacked at newsstands alongside the long-standing rivals. Today, the New York Sun debuts after months of buzz in media columns in its own city and around the world, which have speculated not only about the paper itself, but also about one of its backers, a controversial Canadian media mogul named Lord Conrad Black.

Some might say the Sun is part debut, part resurrection. The Sun was New York’s first penny paper and published from 1833 through its demise in 1950. It’s mentioned in passing most Decembers, when nostalgic editors trot out its most famous column--an 1897 letter to the editor from a girl named Virginia who wanted to know if there was in fact a Santa Claus.

Today’s Sun has many Santas--a board of magnate mega-millionaires who pay the rent on the lofty modern newsroom a block from where the Sun originally rose. The old Sun offered a view of City Hall over the clatter of carts and the bustle of barristers. The new one overlooks a comestibles establishment called Popeye’s Chicken and Biscuits and a haberdashery shop called Hip-Hip Fashion.

But nostalgia reigns at the Sun, where editor Seth Lipsky hovers like the kind of wire-rimmed, suited man Dickens would have created had he written a novel about the news racket. Lipsky, a former Wall Street Journal star (he launched the Asian edition) and editor-in-chief of the Jewish daily the Forward, envisions the Sun as a New York-centric, big-business-wooing outlet for the conservative sensibilities he has said go unexpressed and unsatisfied in the city’s dominant broadsheet.

The paper’s regular roster of contributors is a veritable who’s who of free market-hailing, big government-damning writers, including Reagan biographer Peggy Noonan and columnist R. Emmett Tyrell Jr., one of the founders of the right-wing American Spectator. In what some would say is ripe irony, their writing will run under the original Sun motto, “It Shines for All,” which spoke to the original paper’s cheerleading for labor unions, immigration and the rights of its predominantly working-class readership.

Lipsky’s views and ambitions are matched by those of the backer he calls a “classical news baron”--Lord Black, whose involvement has received more column space in papers around the world than the 20 pages that make up the New York Sun. Black’s media empire is the third-largest worldwide--after Rupert Murdoch’s and Gannett’s--and stretches from the American Midwest to Canada, England and Israel. But with all that international capital, it’s his involvement within the Sun--$2 million bought him a 12% stake--that gives him his first toehold in the media capital of the world.

It’s rare that one rich man’s relatively small investment has attracted such attention. But Black’s move is a long-expected one, gained after years of vain attempts to buy a variety of New York publications, including the weekly Observer and the Daily News.

And it’s Black custom to cultivate gossip and speculation as readily as he does newspapers. He is famous for buying up entire regions of dailies--until recently he owned every newspaper in three Canadian provinces--to fund his empire, and then sinking massive amounts of his stockholders’ money into papers that showcase his own political views.

This has led many critics to categorize his holdings as either business projects or money pits stamped with his neoconservative agenda, which includes his unabashed support of corporate interest and his vitriolic disdain for government regulation, welfare and what he has described as the “featherbedding greed” of organized labor.

“There’s no path to New York media domination through being one of the people at the New York Sun,” says media critic and Black biographer Richard Siklos. “But it is an interesting and admirable addition to the New York media scene. “People are intrigued by the paper, and by Black, by the idea ideas of a Victorian Fleet Street press baron type in the era of USA Today and 24-hour news channels.”

Black’s company has issued a press release “clarifying” that Black’s role in the Sun would be a “passive and minority” one. But Lipsky says Black will certainly play a role in the development of the paper, both ideologically and journalistically. Their politics are aligned, he says--”that’s why I wooed him”--and adds that what “Conrad says is listened to with exceptional attentiveness because he knows so much about newspapers.”

“He looks at a paper as a paper, not as a balance sheet,” says Canadian essayist Robert Fulford, who was the editor of the now-defunct Toronto-based magazine Saturday Night when Black bought it in 1987. “He knows how to make good newspapers, and he’s very proud of that.”

Neither Black, nor anyone in his inner circle, was willing to be interviewed for this article. But just about anyone else in Canadian or New York media criticism has something to say--on or off the record--about Black.

Black, the 58-year-old son of a Canadian brewer, began his newspaper career writing editorials for small papers, the likes of which he quickly began buying up with his family fortune while still in his 20s. Black parlayed those papers into the media empire he named Hollinger. Today, it includes the Chicago Sun-Times and a handful of smaller stateside papers, the Jerusalem Post, London’s Daily Telegraph (the central diamond in his crown), and Canadian titles that he buys and sells with such alacrity that not even his own New York-based assistant can tell you within a ballpark figure how many publications he owns on a given day.

He oversees those properties from his many estates, one of which he calls Havenwold, where the coat of arms he commissioned hangs above the entrance.

Fulford recalls experiencing an eerie deja vu upon meeting the man he calls Citizen Black. “As I was talking to him, he was joking, facetious, wordy and grand. And I thought I had met him before, talked to him before. But actually I hadn’t--I was thinking of Orson Welles as Citizen Kane,” he says.

It’s his Kane-like contrast of puffed-up swagger and cerebral polish that secures his mystique. He’s a man of “extraordinary substance and historical knowledge,” says Lipsky, who notes that Black traffics in the tweedy sort of intellectualism some people say was ushered out with the World Wars that so fascinate him. Black has written a scholarly book about Quebecois politician Maurice Duplessis, and fluently and frequently drops references to Roosevelt and King George into quotidian conversation.

But dropping names of dead historical figures has never been enough for Black--it’s his hobnobbing with living ones that has defined his social persona. For years he’s been a fixture on London’s dinner party circuit, where the calligraphied place cards feature such names as Margaret Thatcher. Fulford recalls listening to Black list acquaintances Katharine Graham, the Aga Khan, Henry Kissinger and Thatcher in a single conversation. “I remember he leaned back satisfied as he dropped each name,” Fulford says. “It occurred to me that I might never witness this feat equaled in my lifetime.”

Black has always wanted to be regarded as more than a mere party presence, not just moving with the movers and shakers but shaking with them as well. In 1998, he tired of simply owning papers and decided to invent one to give himself a significant arena for debate and influence in Canada. He launched what he envisioned to be the national paper of Canada: The National Post.

His two goals for the venture were to have a successful neoconservative paper and to unite the Canadian right. In the end, the Post launched its own political party, the Canadian Alliance, headed up by the newspaper’s top brass, and Black’s company hemorrhaged money until he shocked Canada by selling off his baby last year, losing $300 million in the process. Naomi Klein, a left-wing columnist for the Globe and Mail, says the irony of the Post’s failure is that it collapses the market model that defines Black’s politics. “It’s funny--he obviously doesn’t believe in capitalism,” she says, laughing. “He launches papers to make the case that the market is the arbiter of all that is good, but his newspapers lose spectacular amounts of money. He’s the perfect example that his model doesn’t work”--at least at his high-profile properties, excepting the Daily Telegraph.

Black’s newspaper model isn’t just an economic one, but an editorial one. David Radler, the president of Hollinger, explained the company’s editorial policy this way to the Canadian magazine Maclean’s: “If editors disagree with us ... then they’re no longer in our employ. The buck stops with ownership.” And, oddly for a newspaperman, Black’s disdain for journalists--whom he calls “swarming, grunting jackals”--knows no bounds. In his autobiography, Black famously wrote, “One of the greatest myths of the industry: the journalists are essential to producing a newspaper.”

His view clearly does not extend to his wife, Barbara Amiel, a conservative Briton who is one of the Sun’s featured columnists. Acquaintances and critics of Black alike say their marriage is key to understanding the man and his newspaper business. Fittingly, says Fulford, the story goes that Black “acquired” her, like so many of his papers. Having read her writing, Black decided she was to be his second wife and proposed to her before they had any relationship. Today, her columns express their shared ideals in the London Telegraph, and now the Sun.

While Black’s personal politics will certainly find a place in New York journalism as long as the Sun rises every weekday, its anyone’s guess how long that run might last and what role he’ll play in influencing public life in the city. “This project is designed to make money--if it doesn’t, it’s a failure. And it’s designed to affect public life--if it doesn’t, it’s a failure. It’s gotta do both to succeed,” Lipsky said, seated in his office off the newsroom.

But the notion that the paper--and Black along with it--will succeed financially is laughable to main members of New York’s media elite. At the party Tina Brown threw two weeks ago at her midtown home to celebrate the launch, tipsy guests were reportedly placing bets on how long the paper would last--one year or two.

“There’s no way they’ll make any money--all it is for is politics,” said New Yorker editor and opinion writer Hendrik Hertzberg. “That’s the main reason anyone would want to invest in a venture like this that has no chance of making money--to advance an ideology,” he said. “And because they love publishing. I doubt it will have much impact on politics, but it will certainly add to the discussion, and that’s always a good thing.”

“I don’t know what his Rosebud is, but I suspect it’s this desperate need to be seen as successful at this game,” said Toronto Star editor Jim Travers. Whether New York desires a press baron reminiscent of an era past and another daily broadsheet published blocks from the ground zero scar that has come to represent the complexities and chaos of our modern age--that’s anyone’s guess. But with all the buzz about this man and his venture, it seems Brown’s guests aren’t the only ones placing wagers--and that it’s Black who is perhaps making the greatest gamble of all.