New York Sun To Offer Free Access to New York Times Subscribers in Event of Walkout

The New York Sun, reacting to reports that the staff of the New York Times has threatened a walkout against the Gray Lady, said today that it would permit subscribers to the Times to read the Sun for free online for up to a week of a newsroom work stoppage.The Sun’s announcement, made by its publisher, followed a report in New York magazine Friday that his counterpart at the Times, A.G. Sulzberger, had received a letter signed by more than 1,000 members of the Times staff.Those employees wrote that they “have been lectured about the dire economic future the company faces” even as the Times represents itself to Wall Street bankers as a “successful corporation that can afford to pay millions in salaries and benefits to its top executives.” “Enough,” the letter said, “If there is no contract by Dec. 8, we are walking out.”The threat, the Sun’s publisher, Dovid Efune, said, “shocked me down to the ground.” He said he had heard how embittered the Times newsroom had become. He said he felt “terrible” for the suffering of the staff of the Times and also for the Times’s readers, who could be stranded without a full report.Reports of the planned walkout bill it as a 24-hour event. The duration of such labor strife, though, is not always predictable, and Mr. Efune immediately ordered arrangements to be made to permit Times subscribers to read the Sun for free for the first week of a stoppage and said he would review the situation thereafter.New York magazine quotes one longtime editor at the Times, Tom Coffey, as opining, “I think this is the worst I’ve seen it since the staff mutiny that led to Howell Raines being fired” in 2003. Mr. Raines was the executive editor felled by the fallout from errors and made-up facts by reporter Jayson Blair. One of the paper’s film critics, Manohla Dargis, ventured that “I think the paper sometimes forgets that we are not here as priests and nuns having committed ourselves to Christ for no money. We are laborers, and we need to get paid for the work.”The Gray Lady’s television critic, James Poniewozik, fumed that the Times distributed “150M in stock buybacks to benefit shareholders” but is dragging its feet when it comes to providing a “fair contract it can clearly afford to support the people who made its success possible.” The New York Times Guild spotlights the paper’s purchase of Wordle and the Athletic for big bucks, as well as its anticipated “annual operating profit of $320 million or more” to demand that every employee receive a minimum of “$65,000 a year” rather than what they currently earn. The union notes that what they have received thus far from the Sulzberger dynasty are “lunch boxes and excuses about economic uncertainty.” Without their talents, the employees insist, the paper of record is merely a “blank page.”“This is why,” Mr. Efune said, “The New York Sun is giving free access to the Sun’s coverage for the first week of any walk-out that takes place at the Times starting December 8. We may have a different world view from the Times, but we don’t blame its readers.”Mr. Efune said that if a strike does occur, a pop-up invitation would appear on the Sun’s website — www.nysun.com — that subscribers to the Times can click for access to the Sun without charge during the first week of any strike. The publisher did caution that reading the Sun might expose Times readers to editorials in favor of certain causes to which the Times gives short shrift or is hostile — religious freedom, say, low taxes, or sound money.

New York Sun To Offer Free Access to New York Times Subscribers in Event of Walkout

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