The New York Sun newspaper is shutting down after running out of money, ending a six-year run in which the newspaper provided an alternative conservative voice in the city's crowded media market.
Tomorrow's edition will be the paper's last, newspaper spokesman Michael Moi said today. He declined to elaborate.
Editor Seth Lipsky had been scrambling to attract new investors for the paper, one that laid claim to a grand tradition by taking the name of the original New York Sun, a Pulitzer Prize-winning giant that published for more than a century before disappearing in 1950.
On September 4, Lipsky announced the paper had endured "substantial" losses and would close at the end of the month without an infusion of cash.
The Sun forcefully defended Israel, repeatedly sounded the alarm about Iran and backed President George W Bush's decision to invade Iraq. The paper also took political and socio-economic stances that were unpopular in a city teeming with Democrats.
"It was a newspaper especially savoured by people who don't like The New York Times, and there are plenty of those in New York," said Alex Jones, a former Times reporter who now directs the Shorenstein Centre on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
The paper, which published only on weekdays, was also scrappy, scoring scoops against its competition despite a much smaller roster of reporters.
The paper's demise wasn't entirely unexpected. The Sun's odds of survival were long from the start: Many newspapers were losing advertising to the Web when the Sun began publishing on April 16, 2002, and the trend has picked up speed at most publications.
The paper's investors included Canadian newspaper baron Conrad Black and several prominent New Yorkers with deep pockets. Estimates of the initial investment ran from $US20 million ($A24.16 million) to $US25 million ($A30.2 million).
Black, who's serving a six year prison sentence for swindling shareholders of the former Hollinger International media empire, recently penned an opinion piece for the Sun, endorsing Republican Senator John McCain for president.
