071906

Tour of the Sun

I met up with a guy yesterday who’s a columnist for the New York Sun in their Arts and Culture section. He’s kind of a quirky guy, but that made him interesting. Anyway, he gave me a quick tour of the Sun’s news room.

The Sun is a new paper with an old name. The original New York Sun was published in the late 1800’s and is known for having published the editorial “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” in 1897. The new New York Sun is a small paper, even compared to amNewYork and Metro, the free commuter papers. It was launched in 2002 by a group of New York City businessmen.

I had never been in a real newsroom before. I expected it to be loud and busy, like you see in the movies, with story ideas and papers flying left and right and a matter-of-fact editor-in-chief sequestered behind a glass door labeled “Perry White.” What I saw instead was a typical office setting with people typing away quietly on their computers, trying to meet the evening deadline so the paper could go out in the morning.

I suppose I should’ve expected that it would be pretty low-key. As a journalist I’m more of a Jimmy Olsen than a Clark Kent. It’s adventure-free Jimmy Olsen that should be the one to realize that journalism is a working man’s job. After all, despite the sensational nature of a handful of stories, the bulk of the news is pretty mundane.

Anyway, after the guy showed me around I asked him a few questions about how he worked. Apparently he’s got his nose into various arts and culture events around the city. He attends them in the evening and then writes about them in the morning. That’s it. I didn’t get a chance to talk to some of the hard news folks (I would’ve liked to), but I got the impression that work at the Sun has an even pace to it, with plenty of time to think about what you’re writing.

I got the impression that the Sun is very “old journalism” with a heavy emphasis on the print side of things. Still, they have a decent, if cluttered, website. I’ve seen worse. And the news is news, whether it’s online, in print, or scrawled on the subway wall.

Like a lot of smaller papers, they get most of their international stuff off the AP news wire. For local and business, they pull some stuff off of Bloomberg, but they have a team of dedicated staff reporters. Maybe I can grab an interview with one of them and find out what the news news is like.

After chatting, the guy suggested that I pitch the Sun a column idea. Frankly, there are times when I feel like I can’t even pitch a baseball. I just nodded and told him I’d think about it. Maybe I will, but who knows?