Where Have all the East Coast Intellectual Conservatives Gone?
The New York Sun, home of the hilarious and enterprising Eli Lake, will likely publish its last issue on Monday, Gawker leaked yesterday. Editor Seth Lipsky declined to comment on the news when asked for a confirmation by the New York Observer, but I'd bet my meager City Paper paycheck that the Sun sets in the next week (a little secret: I know an employee who's out looking for a new job as I type).
And I have to say that it all makes me very sad. [Insert bitching & moaning over the state of print journalism here.]
The closing of the flamboyant Sun leaves us fiscal conservatives digging through the mechanical WSJ and the ever so prim Financial Times for our insights. But what Gawker calls "the death of East Coast intellectual conservatism" is hardly a death, or even a hibernation. Smart money musings and small government sentiments have made their way to the web quite nicely, and the ranks of readers have swelled in the wake of Paulson's ever-so-stinky bullshit bailout bonanza. There's even a new site for cultural "reactionaries," which is what I call myself when I'm not gorging on Munsters-themed porn. (Haven't you heard? Reacting is the new black!)
But the real tragedy is that a future without the Sun means one less voice--in print or on the web--arguing against the fuckwits on The Washington Post's editorial page, all of whom recognize the "economic crisis" as an opportunity to spend other peoples' money. (Hey, Anne O. Krueger, Trotsky called--said he wants you to return his trousers and that book of econ theory you borrowed.)
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11:41 am
I don't even get a link for the Munsters-themed porn? Come on, Riggs! Aggregate me!
11:42 am
You said you didn't want to hear about it! (It was awesome, btw.)
12:09 pm
Yeah, but it's not like the Sun is some centurys-old broadsheet. It only opened up shop like five years ago. That's like opening up a pager store in 2000.
12:15 pm
Re: That’s like opening up a pager store in 2000.
Zing! I smell a thread winner.
Still, a mixed business model that relies on advertising as well as donations is what keeps conservative magazines afloat. I don't think it was too far out to expect that the same system could have worked for an ideological newspaper.
1:52 pm
"a mixed business model that relies on advertising as well as donations is what keeps conservative magazines afloat"
Yeah I see your point, but I'm not that surprised that that model doesn't work for a newspaper. For one thing, it just costs a lot more money to publish a daily newspaper than it does to publish a weekly magazine. Plus, you waste all that money publishing news stories. Even if they're WashTimes-quality biased junk, it's still not a lot of bang for your ideological buck. A magazine chock full of ideologically validating arguments is going to be a lot more popular than a newspaper with just one to three pages of the same. Finally, a lot of those conservative magazines (and moreso the journals like Policy Review) are heavily subsidized by the think tanks that treat them as their very own publishing arm (sometimes this is a literal relationship, as that between PR and the Hoover Institute). The think tank drops all that money on the journal because they want the patina of legitimacy when they publish their articles there. You just don't get that sort of symbiotic relationship with a newspaper (although I will admit that it seems like there's a space reserved on just about every WSJ editorial page for a Hoover Institute missive).