Mayor Adams Welcomes Relaunched Sun Back Into Fray
At a Carnegie Hall gala, Adams exhorted the paper to “inspire us to do better” and declared that “the Sun is once again in the sky.”
“Just because it’s in a tweet doesn’t mean that it’s in the street.” That was one piece of wisdom imparted by Mayor Adams as he extolled the idea of classical newspaper journalism to the assembled guests, family, and staff of The New York Sun Wednesday evening at a launch gala at Carnegie Hall.
The Sun’s publisher, Dovid Efune, in remarks heard over the clink of champagne flutes and the scratch of chopsticks, called the launch of the Sun on a sharply expanded online platform a “188 year old startup.” The room was festooned with framed front pages from the 19th and 20th century.
In the present Hizzoner exhorted the paper to “inspire us to do better” and declared that “the Sun is once again in the sky.”
The editor of the Sun, Seth Lipsky, shared with the group a brief history of the Sun. Turning to the mayor, the editor said that even though the internet has lowered the barriers of entry for newspapers aspiring to cover the country and the world, New York would always remain “at the heart of our beat.”
Mr. Efune invoked the biblical King David in adumbrating the paper’s posture as an underdog with a small staff, big dreams, and a “trusty slingshot.” He reminded the crowd that “a newsroom can be vast, but its ideas limited, and also that a newsroom can be limited, yet its ideas vast.”
The Sun’s chief foreign correspondent, Benny Avni, who holds the record for the most bylines in the Sun, was saluted. Other stalwarts from the Sun’s print era — among them Pia Catton, Amanda Gordon, Joseph Goldstein, and Harry Siegel, to name but a few — were present, as was the paper’s founding managing editor, Ira Stoll, whose column appears weekly in the Sun.
As the wine bottles were stowed away, the step & repeat was disassembled, and the lights switched on, the lingering staff of the the Sun spilled out onto the street to plot their next story, headline, and maybe even a tweet.