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The Trump bump is still alive. At least that is true for The New York Sun, the once storied broadsheet, which just a few years ago was on the verge of shutting down permanently.
Under the ownership of Dovid Efune, who acquired the nearly defunct title four years ago, The New York Sun has pivoted to the right of the political spectrum. In recent months that shift has gained the attention of the 47th US president, bolstering subscriptions.
“It’s not lost on us that the president has taken a lot of interest in the Sun,” Efune told the Financial Times in an interview outside the New York Palace Hotel.
“He posts our articles regularly on Truth Social. He sent handwritten notes to our writers . . . and I certainly think that there is a growing perception, and there’s a lot of truth to it, that we are a newspaper that the White House reads and takes seriously,” he said.
Donald Trump’s interest in The New York Sun comes at a time when the US president’s staff have been booting out White House pool reporters from publications deemed to be hostile to the administration. These moves, which have intensified fears that Trump is eroding the norms of American democracy, have provided an opportunity for smaller media groups to get inside the White House and become bigger players in the political arena.
The British-born publisher, who has risen to prominence since joining the race to buy The Telegraph, said the Trump bump had helped tip The New York Sun into the black as paid subscriptions had risen to tens of thousands, while its newsletter reached 1.5mn people.
Since taking over, Efune has expanded The New York Sun’s reporting beyond the city with a strong presence in Washington as well as internationally in Europe and Israel. The 39-year-old, who started his career at the US conservative Jewish community paper The Algemeiner Journal, overseeing its switch from Yiddish to English, is an outspoken defender of Israel.
With just over 1mn average monthly page views and 613,000 unique viewers, according to analytics company Similarweb, The New York Sun is small compared with its larger rivals, The New York Times and the New York Post.
Efune declined to speak about the bid for The Telegraph, given that he was not allowed to comment on it publicly. However, the deal with RedBird IMI, the British conservative newspaper’s owner, seems to have stalled after months of negotiations.
Efune was convinced, though, that the strategy of focusing on “principle over politics and people over party” married with the tacit support of Trump, who has been brandishing printed copies of The New York Sun’s articles in the White House, would propel them to a new glory era.
The New York Sun has lived multiple lives since its founding in 1833. As one of the city’s first penny papers, it democratised news consumption, moving beyond the business and political elite to cater to the working class as well as being among the first to produce crime reporting and human-interest stories.
At its peak in the late 19th century, the Sun was one of New York’s dominant dailies, competing fiercely with The New York Times and New York World. While it never eclipsed the Times in circulation for sustained periods, it was a formidable rival in the city’s crowded media market, particularly under the ownership of Charles Dana, who shaped its reputation for sharp editorialising and a distinctive writing style.
By 1950, the original Sun folded into the New York World-Telegram, ending its first chapter. The title lay dormant until 2002, when it was resurrected as a conservative-leaning broadsheet under Seth Lipsky.
Efune said he was convinced that he could, with the help of Trump, bring the paper back to play a role in shaping the political discourse.
“The valley of death might be longer and deeper than for other enterprises, but to have passed out of that . . . and very much on the front foot as a strong, viable, long-term journalistic enterprise is very exciting,” he said.
