Comment; extra!(new newspaper, the 'Sun,' to be launched in New York City)(The Talk of theTown)(Brief Article)

If you are the sort of person who believes that a newspaper is ipso facto exciting in a way that a Web site or a mixed pair of lacquered television announcers behind a desk labelled "Eyewitness News" can never be, and if you think that a newsstand, no matter how many brands of breath mints it carries or cleavage magazines it displays, is unworthy of the name unless its focal point is a bench piled with half a dozen fresh stacks of locally printed broadsheets and tabloids, then you are also the sort of person who will welcome the rising, come Tuesday morning, April 16th, of the Sun. What the Sun will be rising from is the dead. A newspaper by that name was published in this city from September 3, 1833, until January 4, 1950, and the new Sun, though it has no more connection with the old one than Elvis Costello has with Elvis Presley, has no less, either. The new Sun's gothic nameplate is an exact replica of the old one's, with the same colophon -- an engraving of a sunrise flanked by the goddesses of Justice and Liberty over the slogan "It Shines for All." The new Sun will look remarkably like the old one during its twilight years, with a fussy, seven-column front page featuring smallish headlines stacked atop one another like pancakes, many of them in Cheltenham Bold Condensed, a typeface that was already musty in 1950. To all this one can only say: Swell!

Seth Lipsky, the founder of the new Sun, is a cheerful, pear-shaped, Pickwickian man of fifty-five. Put him in a starched collar, high-button shoes, and a swallowtail coat and stick a pair of muttonchops on the sides of his bald head, and he would look just like one of the nineteenthcentury legends of Newspaper Row -- Horace Greeley, say, or (with the addition of a long white beard) Charles A. Dana himself, the editor of the previous Sun during its Gilded Age heyday. Here are four salient points about Seth Lipsky. First, he is a staunch conservative and a Jabotinskyite Zionist, which has helped make it possible for him to raise the millions needed to start even a miniature New York daily (the Sun will have fewer than twenty pages, and its initial press run will be sixty thousand, five per cent of the Times') from the likes of Roger Hertog, a funder of right-wing think tanks, and Lord Black of Crossharbour, the formerly Canadian press magnate formerly known as Conrad Black, who owns the London Daily Telegraph. Second, he is an experienced newspaper entrepreneur; he helped launch the Asian and European editions of the Wall Street Journal and, in 1990, started the well-regarded English-language weekly edition of the Forward, once the passionately Socialist voice of New York's Yiddish-speaking masses. (Lipsky dreamed of taking the Forward daily, but by 2000 his politics had exhausted the patience of the alter kockers in the Forward Association, some of whom had personally known Eugene V. Debs, and he was let go.) Third, he is a bang-up newspaper editor, whose specialty is finding, training, and slave-driving young journalistic talent. Fourth, he is a hard-core newspaper sentimentalist.

As such, Lipsky naturally tried to rent space in the ...