New Republic and conservative NY Sun have same owners?

[madfloridian]

I missed this when it was posted in 2004, but Sirota's email reminded me as it linked to it.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/1/1/225832/0551

From 2004:

Oh, and if anyone has any doubts left about TNR's intentions:

The New Republic recently sold two-thirds of its ownership to Roger Hertog and Michael Steinhardt, New York financiers who also recently launched the conservative daily New York Sun. Estimates are that the pair will shovel millions of dollars' worth of subsidies into TNR, as it's known in the media world.

Who are Robert Hertog and Michael Steinhardt? The American Prospect tells us:
http://www.prospect.org/print/V13/8/tomasky-m.html

Why would Steinhardt, a Democrat who essentially seeded and watered the Progressive Policy Institute, the think-tank appendage of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), want to finance a newspaper that will have the Sun's conservative politics? Why would Hertog, a man of the right and chairman of the Manhattan Institute, the prominent conservative think tank, want a piece of the liberal (more than not, anyway) New Republic?

Why, aside from the obvious relief of financial stress, would TNR owner Martin Peretz reduce himself to a minority interest in the magazine he's supported for 28 years?

The answer may be best expressed not by Hertog, Steinhardt, or Peretz, but by Seth Lipsky, editor of the Sun and a man whose decade-long dream of starting a new New York daily is finally coming to fruition. "The right wing of the Democratic Party," Lipsky told me recently, "is a depressed stock." Interesting that it took a journalist to produce the apposite business metaphor. And though the reference to party label shouldn't be taken too literally, Lipsky is describing both the certain ideological niche of the Sun and a likely trajectory of the Hertog-Steinhardt New Republic with some precision. It's exactly on the right-most edge of the Democratic cliff -- where the DLC begins to morph into, say, the American Enterprise Institute; where neoliberalism and neoconservatism, each of which is a vestigial presence now in the twenty-first century, collapse into some new entity that doesn't yet have a fully formed identity, or a name -- that these four men meet, despite having arrived by vastly different paths.

And a little more:

"Tomasky's excellent TAP piece also tells us that Hertog is chairman of the prominent right-wing think tank the Manhattan Institute, is affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute, and is a donor to the Club for Growth. While Steinhardt led the DLC until -- get this -- he quit in 1996 in protest of President Clinton's rabid left-wing agenda in his first term."

[rusty charly]

1. Web site will no longer be behind a subscriber pay wall

The New York Sun has announced that new daily content on its Web site will no longer be behind a subscriber pay wall.

The Sun stated in a press release that the changes were brought about after requests from readers asking for content to be more accessible to those outside of the New York metropolitan area. The move to a free access platform was also seen by executives as a natural progression towards the service of the Sun’s expanding readership.

The Web site will continue to offer a paid version for readers using the Sun’s online archives. The paid premium content includes all articles, photographs, editorials, and advertisements that have been printed in the Sun since the paper’s inception in 2002.

This year, the five-day-a-week broadsheet doubled its distribution to 100,000 and increased its advertising by more than 50 percent.

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/departments/online/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002952204