As well as backing from Lord Black the paper is being backed by prominent New York investors, including Michael Steinhardt, a former hedge fund star, and current hedge fund manager Bruce Kovner, as well as Russell Carson and Joseph Steinberg, who are well known buyout investors.
Details of the launch were revealed by the newspaper's president and chief executive officer Seth Lipsky, a former Wall Street Journal editor and reporter, who will be editor of The New York Sun, and by its vice-president and managing editor Ira Stoll, a former journalist with the LA Times.
The New York Sun will publish five days a week and says that it will offer its readers priority coverage of New York City, which it claims is absent from the city since The New York Times moved to become a national publication. Coverage of New York will come from The New York Sun's own staff and columnists, freelance contributors and news services.
According to Lipsky: "Our mission at The New York Sun will be to provide priority coverage of New York City and the national and international news that affects it and to provide a high-quality broadsheet environment to advertisers desiring to reach the New York market."
He added: "We will seek an audience in all five boroughs and will aim to produce a newspaper for serious New Yorkers who are participants in the political, commercial, cultural, sporting and spiritual life of this city."
The New York Sun will be owned by SL LLC, a company established in September by Lipsky and Stoll and backed by a group of mostly New York investors.
As reported in November, among the investors is Lord Black, who owns the Telegraph Group in the UK and already owns the Chicago Sun Times. He is reported to be backing the new launch with a reported £10.6m.
"It is no small thing that a group of businessmen of this calibre has stepped forward -- and stood together -- at this time to back a new newspaper for New York," Lipsky said. "The common denominator of the members of this group is neither their political nor business interests but the fact that they care about New York."
The paper will be headquartered at 105 Chambers Street, adjacent to City Hall and what had been known as "Newspaper Row" since the days when New Yorkers could choose from as many as 17 daily English-language newspapers. The paper will be sold in all five boroughs and will be available for single copy purchase on newsstands and by home delivery.
The New York Sun will cover politics, business, real estate, philanthropy, education, religion, culture, entertainment and sports. It will also include a diverse group of columnists and freelance op-ed contributors and feature special sections on areas such as shopping, fashion, health, technology, food and travel.
Lipsky spent nearly 20 years with the Wall Street Journal as a reporter, foreign correspondent, foreign editor and member of the editorial board. He left the Journal in 1990 to become founding editor of the Forward, the English-language successor to the Jewish Daily Forward. He was the publication's president and CEO and its editor from 1990 to 2000.
Stoll is founding editor of smartertimes.com, which since June 2000 has posted on the web a daily critique of The New York Times that has been quoted and profiled by major publications around the world. He formerly served as Washington correspondent and managing editor of the Forward, as a reporter for the LA Times and as president of the undergraduate daily at Harvard, The Harvard Crimson.
The original Sun began publication on September 3 1833, and evolved into one of the US's most influential and revered publications. Its last edition was on January 4 1950.
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