|
Last year, organizers of the West Indian-American Day Parade invited five New York City Council members on a "fact-finding" mission to Trinidad and Tobago's carnival to study what makes the event so popular and profitable. Based on New York City's annual budget, it appears the trip paid off — at least for the organizers.
Buried deep in the city's budget documents is a $100,000 allocation for the Brooklyn parade, twice as much as the group received last year.
While many New Yorkers would agree that events like the West Indian Day Parade, the city's largest ethnic celebration, are worthy of some funding from the city's $47 billion budget, the City Council is not exactly forthcoming about the details of such decisions and how members benefit from them.
Each year as part of the annual budget, the New York City Council doles out millions of dollars to community groups, arts organizations, Little League teams, and parades. (For a list of what more than a dozen council members say they received from the budget see related article.)
But when it comes to these initiatives, the City Council:
And most council members defend the practice, arguing that the money goes to needy causes in their districts.
"They call pork the other white meat," East Harlem City Councilmember Philip Reed told the Daily News. "Meaning, it's good for you."
Where does the money come from? Who decides where it goes? And do these grants really help a neighborhood and its residents, or are they just taxpayer-funded efforts to help get officials re-elected?
At all levels of government, elected officials lobby for funding for projects in their home districts. For New York City Council members, who have less power to set policy than lawmakers in Albany or Washington, these budget allocations represent some of the most tangible evidence of what they have done for their constituents.
City Council members obtain money for their districts in four primary ways.
Each of the 51 City Council members is given a sum of money — often called "member items" or "discretionary funds" — to spend in their districts.
This year, each member received a total of $240,000, of which $60,000 must go to programs for the elderly and $100,000 must go to youth programs. Officials allocate the remaining $80,000 in their districts as they wish.
Although each City Council member is given that same amount of money, many members take credit for obtaining these grants as a way of bolstering their accomplishments.
Riverdale City Councilmember G. Oliver Koppell, for example, recently sent out a press release announcing that he had "obtained an increased amount of funding" for senior programs. "The programs I am helping to fund provide much needed services to our most vulnerable citizens and add to the quality of life," Koppell said in the statement.
Koppell, however, did not mention that each of the other 50 City Council members also received the same amount of money. But when it comes to the specifics of how an individual council member divides his or her discretionary funds, elected officials often are less forthcoming.
When asked how he doled out his $80,000 in member items, Canarsie Councilmember Lew Fidler said he did not feel comfortable giving all of the details because community groups that did not receive funds may feel left out.
And Flushing Councilmember John Liu even rejected the idea that member items really exist, arguing that the council arrives at a budget as a body.
"I don't have anything that's called a member item," said Liu. "There are local initiatives that are suggested strongly by a council member."
In addition, each borough delegation — the group of council members representing each borough — is given a pot of money. For example, this year the Queens delegation received $250,000, which was split among the 14 Queens council members. With their money, Queens council members funded projects like the Queens Symphony Orchestra, which received $78,000.
To decide who is worthy of funding, borough delegations hold open meetings where individual non-profit groups come and "testify" as to how much money they need. These meetings are not widely advertised, and a group must know when and where these meetings occur.
Another large sum of money belongs to City Council Speaker Gifford Millerwho, along with Mayor Michael Bloomberg, has the largest influence over what goes into the city budget. Miller can also dispense large grants on behalf of the legislative body.
For example, the New York Junior Tennis League, which offers free lessons to kids, received $486,500 from the city budget this year. And while the budget documents don't say that the money came from the speaker, the tennis organization's web site does: "Funded By Council Speaker Gifford Miller" the web site states prominently.
Miller's office refused to say how much money the speaker allocated this year, saying only that the grants "represent the City Council's priorities."
To get the speaker's support for projects within their district, individual council members must convince him that they have worthy projects. Politics also comes into play; the speaker can use his power to reward or punish certain council members based on their support for him in other matters.
"Some of us are good at this and some of us aren't," said one council member who did not want to be named. "Those of us who are good at it are supposed to keep our mouths shut."
In addition to funds in the city's annual operating budget, each council member also lobbies for projects in the separate $6 billion capital budget, which covers the purchase, repair, or construction of physical items that cost over $35,000 and that last for at least five years.
These are often big ticket items, like computer equipment for schools, improvements to parks, or expansion of local libraries. It is also what City Council members often take the most credit for, since the projects cost millions of dollars and voters can see some tangible results.
But there are other factors that lead to funding beyond a council member's lobbying. For example, Brooklyn City Councilmember Diana Reyna said she obtained $1.6 million toward the development of almost 200 affordable apartments, but that project largely resulted from Mayor Michael Bloomberg's citywide effort to build more housing over the next five years.
The argument for giving City Council members a substantial role in allocating money in their districts is that they know the community's needs.
"You elect council members locally because they know what is needed in their district," said Doug Turetsky of the Independent Budget Office, a watchdog group that monitors the city budget.
But the process of distributing this money is largely obscured from the public.
Most of the lobbying and negotiations takes place behind closed doors. This forces non-profit groups and arts groups into the role of lobbyists, writing letters to their council members, meeting council members in person, and even making trips to City Hall to make sure they are not forgotten.
Budget documents also do not say which City Council member requested which item, which can lead to confusion over who exactly should take credit for obtaining the funding.
The head of one Brooklyn community center, who asked not to be named, said that after receiving a grant for $30,000 this year, he received letters from three different council members all claiming credit for it.
And come election time, politicians go back to the same organizations and groups that they funded looking for campaign donations or help in getting out the vote.
"We are eager to give this money out," said Jack Freedman, chief of staff to Councilmember David Weprin. "But we're politicians, so we also want people to know where it came from."
For a look at what your individual council member obtained in this year's city budget, read What Did Your Council Member Get for Your Neighborhood?
The three budget monitors have weighed in on the recently adopted $47.8 billion city budget, and they agree on two things: First, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the City Council get credit for crafting a balanced budget for the current 2005 fiscal year. Second, all three monitors see big trouble thereafter.
Among the latest reports from the State Financial Control Board (In PDF Format), the City Comptroller (In PDF Format), and the State Comptroller(In PDF Format), the state comptroller's is the most grim, foreseeing deficits considerably above the city's estimates from 2006 to 2008 ($5.1 billion instead of $3.7 billion in 2008, for example.) Worse yet, the state comptroller's report suggests a possible further $700 million deficit in 2007 (and $1.2 billion in 2008).
What to do? Well, that's not exactly the monitors' job. Rather, their job is to show how budget choices work out and to suggest some alternative choices that haven't been made.
They are unanimous, for instance, in questioning the use of about $3.5 billion in one-time, non-recurring resources to balance the 2005 budget. They also all point out that the city is not anticipating future education and labor costs in its four-year financial plan. And the Financial Control Board highlights the long-term fiscal risks of not fully funding capital maintenance needs.
Non-Recurring Budget Resources
The single largest reason for both the 2005 budget balance and the longer-term budget deficits is the use of one-time resources, primarily non-recurring revenues. The Financial Control Board lists over $3.5 billion of such resources in the 2005 budget:
Among these are more than $1.9 billion in surplus from fiscal year 2004.
Also, after years of wrangling over rental payments between the city, which owns the land under LaGuardia and Kennedy airports, and the Port Authority, which manages the airports, a new lease (which will be approved by the authority's board in September) promises the city nearly $700 million as a final settlement of past rents.
The state's picking up the costs of the remaining Municipal Assistance Corporation debt (incurred during the city's 1970s fiscal crisis) means the city will be reimbursed for $502 million in debt service it paid during the 2004 fiscal year.
The $204 million expected from the Battery Park City Authority is mostly ($150 million) from an anticipated, but as yet unexplained, sale of city land to the authority.
The city has argued that using the previous year's surplus should not be counted as using a nonrecurring resource, and the Financial Control Board seems to acknowledge that semantic point by distinguishing between "nonrecurring actions" and "use of the prior-year surplus." An alternative view, of course, is that the $1.7 billion surplus could have been used in any number of other ways (in either 2004 or 2005) so both are actions, or budget choices. And in both cases, the result is a very big hole in the next year's budget.
A big reason for the higher estimates among the fiscal monitors of future budget deficits is the fact that many likely expenditures are simply left out of the mayor's four-year financial plan. Perhaps the most blatant example over the past 10 years is overtime estimates.
The City Comptroller's July report says, "Between FY 1993 and FY 2003, overtime expenditures have averaged 49 percent more than overtime projections at budget adoption." In FY 2003, the city spent $275 million more than projected in the adopted budget, and in 2004 "the city's current estimate of $857 million [in overtime] is $340 million higher than the budget adoption projection."
Another common instance of underestimated expenses is future labor costs. Here there are two problems. First, the financial plan funds near-term labor costs on the model of the recent District Council 37 contract, but the large teacher, police and fire unions still do not have contracts and may not accept that model. And second, the current financial plan has no money for the next round of labor contracts, beginning in fiscal year 2006. The State Comptroller's July report projects that a cost-of-inflation increase in labor costs would add $220 million in expenditures in 2006, $700 million in 2007, and $1.2 billion in 2008.
A new problem still unacknowledged in the financial plan is additional city education funding required in response to the state judge's mandate in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity case. All three monitors' July reports note that the proposals from Governor George Pataki, the State Senate, and the State Assembly all assume additional city spending over the next five years, ranging from a minimum of $554 million (Senate) to $1.2 billion (Assembly) to $1.5 billion (Pataki).
Since the state failed to respond to the court's July 30 deadline for a plan, and since the court has named a commission to report in November on next steps, the city is off the hook for the near future.
Another reason for long-term deficits, of course, is tax cuts. The monitors remind us that the adopted budget tax cuts -- the mayor's property tax rebate to residential owners and the council's new city earned income tax credit -- reduce revenues by about $300 million a year for three years. And, they point out, the phasing out of recent sales tax and personal income tax increases on higher-income New Yorkers will cost the city an additional $1 billion a year in lost revenues beginning in 2007.
In recent years the Financial Control Board has often argued that the city's rising debt service costs are a major cause of structural budget imbalance. The board is certainly unhappy with the new financial plan: "Past efforts to contain the growth in debt service seem to have been abandoned." The board urges the city to "refrain from increasing the total size of its debt-financed capital program."
Their report shows that debt service rises from $4.2 billion in 2004 to $5.3 billion in 2008. The board's favorite measuring rod -- debt service as a percentage of city tax revenues -- rises from 15.3 percent in 2004 to 17.0 percent in 2008. Their conclusion is that "debt service levels for the outyears could be affordable only if revenues increase substantially or spending for competing operating needs is scaled back."
What irritates the board is a new surge of capital commitments, after a January 2003 financial plan that cut back a total of approximately $4 billion in capital commitments across all areas with the exception of environmental protection contracts. Since then, the city has increased commitments in fiscal years 2004-2007 for schools by $5.5 billion, the emergency response communication system by $1.2 billion, economic development by $320 million, and hospitals by $313 million.
It is unclear how much weight the board's report will have on the mayor and council's priorities. But there is one area where the board and the city's priorities ought to be shared: maintaining the city's infrastructure.
The city publishes an annual maintenance report. The latest one identifies $4.4 billion in capital maintenance needs - that is, bringing roads, bridges, schools, police stations, etc. - up to states of good repair. If that's not done, the city can be forced to pay much higher fix-up costs in the future (as happened with city bridges that were not maintained adequately after the city's 1970s fiscal crisis). The control board's report shows that the city is funding only $2.1 billion of those needs, or 49 percent. The maintenance needs of streets and highways used to be funded at least 90 percent. Now they are less than 50 percent.
Who Pays for West Side Development, and How Much?
The three monitors' reports have useful sections on the fiscal implications of Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Pataki's Manhattan West Side development plans. Rather than one clear, comprehensive plan for the area, there are three scenarios at play, each with its own - often sketchy -- financing plan: expansion of the Javits convention center, the Jets Stadium, and the commercial and residential development of the adjoining West Side. Much of the financing depends on actions by public authorities, which means outside normal democratic budgeting processes.
Here is how the Financial Control Board describes the current plans in terms of future city financial obligations:
- Extension of the #7 Subway line and residential/commercial infrastructure: Paid for through $4 billion of bonds issued by a local public authority, with debt service to total $7.6 billion through 2035. The effect on the city budget is not clear, although short-term financing, the likely use of payments-in-lieu-of-taxes (PILOTS), and the designated use of new West Side property taxes could drain money from other city uses.
- $350 million of city support for the expansion of the Javits Center: Paid for through bonds whose debt service would come from Battery Park City Authority revenues, and requiring the agreement of the authority, the city, and the city comptroller. (The comptroller has not announced his position on this proposal.) Othershave argued that such funds are really city funds that should be used for affordable housing.
- $300 million from the city to help pay for the platform for the stadium: No final financing plan has yet been provided by the city.
The control board's reservation about the third scenario -- "the use of city funds to finance a sports facility may ultimately crowd out spending for competing capital projects" - is a useful warning about all the West Side development scenarios.
Glenn Pasanen, former associate director of City Project, teaches political science at Lehman College of the City University.
Henry Scott, the publisher of Metro New York, doesn’t go a day without the New York Times.
"I get the Times home delivered, and I take it to work because I don't have time to read it beforehand,” said Scott, whose paper is the newest newspaper in the nation's last remaining newspaper town. “I carry it around all day, take it home with me, and if I have a few minutes before I go to bed I might read some of it. I think a lot of people are the same way."
Related: NYC Books Readership Of Dailies: The Wall Street Journal -- 2,101,017 |
This, argues Scott, is why New York needed to add yet another newspaper to the 40-some dailies already serving New Yorkers in about a half-dozen languages. A free "commuter daily" like his offers a quick read, a lightweight alternative to the heavy hitters like the Times.
This is the same argument put forth by Russell Pergament, the publisher of AM New York, a competing commuter daily launched late last year.
Everywhere else in the United States, newspapers are in decline -- 98 percent of American cities now have only one daily newspaper; the total number of newspapers in the country, and the total number of readers, has declined every year for the past two decades. In some ways, other news media offer even fewer choices, radio and television stations throughout the nation now dominated by just ten corporations. (See Who Owns New York's News?by Joanna Erenberg and Ian Manheimer)
But New York is the media capital of the world, headquarters for all the nation's television networks, home of an estimated 10,000 journalists, center of an information industry -- which includes not just newspapers, but book and magazine publishing, motion pictures, sound recording, broadcasting, and telecommunications -- that is the city's fourth largest "industry supersector," larger even than finance. Here newspapers still seem to matter, at least to the companies that own them.
But what does their vivid presence mean to New Yorkers and the city as a whole -- economically, politically, culturally, psychologically?
Not that long after New York printed its first newspaper, in 1725 (the paper had a fine name: the Gazette), the city became the kind of colorfully cut-throat newspaper town for which it is known to this day; publishers would race into the harbor to snatch scoops that came sailing in on British ships. By the late 1800’s, the city had 29 daily newspapers, with two – the New York World and the New York Journal -- boasting daily circulations above one million.
With the exception of the Post and the Times, all of these papers have disappeared. But the city as legendary newspaper town remains (see Favorite Books about Newspapers in Gotham Gazette's book section), and not just because of the swashbuckling past. Newer newspapers have taken place of the old, and the New York Post, started by Alexander Hamilton in 1801 and the country’s oldest continuingly published newspaper, is now in a well-publicized war with the New York Daily News, the country’s original tabloid newspaper (an adjective originally meant only to describe its shape), which was founded in 1919.
New York now has about half a dozen major metropolitan, general-interest English-language dailies, depending on how you count (do you include Newsday, for example, based in Long Island and with spotty circulation in the city itself? How about the business-oriented Wall Street Journal, which shuns local news?). It also boasts some three times as many newspaper readers as Los Angeles, the country’s second largest newspaper market. Of the fifteen highest-circulating daily papers in the country, four are published in New York City; there are also some 200 ethnic and community newspapers published in the city; and upstart dailies like the New York Sun continue to emerge, looking to carve their own niche.
Why is this happening here and nowhere else?
The answer is not much of a mystery. New York is both the largest "media market" and the nation’s largest metropolitan area, the home of the greatest number of commuters who use public transportation. It is also diverse enough to make it difficult for one newspaper to appeal to everybody.
All of these newspapers employ reporters, editors, photographers, circulation managers, and many others. All said, the newspaper and periodical industry employed 53,100 employees as of May 2002, not including the countless number of independent journalists in New York who work as freelancers. The entire information industry, according to the city comptroller's office, employs more than 150,000 people, paying them about $9.5 billion in wages over the first three quarters of 2003. The industry also contributed nearly $600 million in city tax revenues.
Newspapers and other media provide intangible economic benefits as well, said Jonathan Schwabish, an economist with the Partnership for New York City.
"You've got the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, which are probably two of the top five newspapers in the world,” he said. “You're combining those, in New York City ... It just adds to the city's reputation as a global center, a global economic force, an entertainment center.”
Operating in the country’s biggest newspaper market doesn’t necessarily pay off financially. The Times, which for the past half dozen years has deliberately positioned itself as a national newspaper rather than a local one, makes most of its money through its national circulation (half of its readers now living out of the metropolitan area). Few of New York’s other papers could be called flush. Elsewhere in the country, newspaper profits continue to be strong even as readership drops; here it is just the opposite.
The Post and the News, in their competition for the city’s readers, best illustrate the mixed blessing of publishing a newspaper in New York City.
The Post is enjoying some of the most rapid circulation growth in the country – its circulation rose 9.3 percent in the six months ending March 30 to 678,012 papers a day (the News has a daily circulation of 802,103). But the newspaper is also losing large amounts of money. Since Rupert Murdoch took over the Post almost 30 years ago, it has lost over $500 million.
While the specifics of the Daily News’ finances are unknown, it is rumored to be barely profitable. The last time it made specific statistics public, in 1998, the News showed annual losses of over $20 million.
The high costs of maintaining a newspaper in this high-priced city – and the pressures of competition – make it harder for newspaper publishers in New York to make money than their counterparts elsewhere. But if even the most widely read newspapers are not financially successful, why continue to compete?
The widespread belief is that New York's big-time newspaper publishers are willing to subsidize their unprofitable enterprises to capture a different kind of coinage -- political influence.
Post owner Rupert Murdoch received a waiver from the Federal Communications Commission’s regulations against owning different media outlets in the same market to buy the Post; he then used the newspaper to lobby for further leniency. His competitor, Daily News owner Mortimer Zuckerman, has pushed a variety of his own pet causes through his newspaper.
“In this tabloid war, the rules of modern capitalism are suspended,” writes the New Yorker’s media writer, Ken Auletta, in his book Backstory.
“While it is true that Murdoch cannot tell his directors that the Post has made money, he can surely confide that it has been good for News Corp,” writes Auletta. “And, more personally, in the words of one close adviser, Murdoch knows that he has gotten â€his conservative precepts across in the biggest market in the country.’”
Better Informed?
When Ben Smith began work for the New York Sun in 2001, having previously reported for the Indianapolis Star, he was struck by the "sense of competition and urgency here. It means," said Smith (who has since left the Sun to work for the weekly New York Observer), "that you wake up every morning and read your competitors with a certain amount of stress."
This competitive stress, some believe, results in fuller coverage, which makes New Yorkers better informed. “When you have people competing head-to-head, it makes people work harder,” said John Morton, a newspaper analyst. “I think, overall, even overlooking some of the lapses, the readers are well served by this.”
Readers apparently agree. According to a recent poll (in pdf format) some 45 percent of New Yorkers believe that the local media helps the city solve its problems, as opposed to 31 percent nationwide.
While local media also includes television and radio stations, many believe that newspapers continue to hold a special place in the news-producing world. The newspaper "may be in decline in certain age groups, and it may be in decline over the horizon, but it is still significant," said Steve Isenberg, who was the last publisher of New York Newsday (before the New York edition folded in 1995). "To my mind, it is still the spinal column for all other news. Every radio and every TV person begins their day with it; they all read the major papers."
It is not just the major English-language newspapers in New York that keep their readers better-informed. Two healthy Spanish-language dailies, Hoy and El Diario, target an immigrant readership with different sets of priorities and bases of knowledge who don’t necessarily get what they need from the English-language press.
"In this paper, we are making a big effort to teach our readers how to integrate to this country, and to this city," said Javier Castaño, the news director of Hoy. "That's why we were covering the [Democratic and Republican National] Conventions, even before they started, with writing, pictures, and graphs explaining how the system works,” he said. “We have that obligation, because our readers are new to this country and this city."
More Alarmed, Maligned, Misled?
Earlier this summer, gruesome crime stories filled the front pages of New York's newspapers, sparking some talk of a summer crime wave,and bringing Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s boasts of a safe city into question.
"The fact is that the incidence of crime remains relatively low,” Paul Browne, deputy commissioner of public information for the New York Police department, responded in the Times. "But the way it’s covered you wouldn’t necessarily know that." Browne claimed that the public’s view on crime is distorted because news organizations devote the same amount of space covering it, even as the actual amount of crime has dropped.
This is not a new complaint. Some argue that crime in New York, and particularly in Central Park, was never as bad as the public perceived. Even when it was the universal symbol for urban chaos New York did not have the worst crime rate in the nation.
Distortion and error, some say, are the downside of a competition that can be overzealous and downright vicious. When the Post ran a front-page story last month mistakenly naming Dick Gephardt as the Democratic choice for vice presidential candidate, the News took pains to rub it in. After using the Post’s cover to illustrate its own cover the next day – and delivering a case of champagne to the Post’s office to congratulate it for the “exclusive” – the Daily News ran several days of stories gloating over its competitor's mistake, a long-running finger-pointing habit that both papers share.
This kind of gleeful harping also targets public figures, which some see as part of the tabloids' major identity and in many cases their strength. But by thriving on conflict, says Andrew White, the tabloids bully public officials into confronting one another, making New York politics all that much more contentious.
The attacks "are not necessarily substantive, they don’t necessarily contribute in a meaningful way to the direction of the city’s effectiveness,” said White, the director of the Center for NYC Affairs at New School University, and the former editor of the monthly magazine City Limits. “But it’s just a reality of New York City politics that you have to deal with.”
Given that so many New York newspapers are losing money, it might seem odd that publishers saw room for more. Odder still, AM New York's publisher, the Tribune Company, which also puts out Hoy and Newsday, is arguably creating its own competition. Already, the competitive pressure is clearly intense: recently, both Newsday and Hoy were caught in a scandalafter inflating circulation numbers to lure readers away from their competitors.
So why add more papers to the mix?
Many say that there is no point, that these papers, with more than 50 times the number of hawkers -- or, as Scott prefers to call them, "street promoters" -- than reporters, are a passing fancy that do not add anything to coverage of the city. "Journalists and readers of well-informed journalism were disappointed" by the content in commuter dailies, said NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg, who is writing a book about local media coverage.
But the publishers of commuter dailies, as well as analysts such as Klinenberg, argue that they may wind up serving a specific and important purpose -- recruiting new readers to the world of newspapers. By offering the Internet generation instant gratification for free, these weekday handouts attract young readers in a way that heftier papers cannot, or so goes the theory. In other markets, such as Chicago, it is the major daily newspapers that have started commuter dailies, grooming young readers who, they hope, will graduate on to a more substantive paper later in life.
Scott of Metro New York subscribes wholeheartedly to this idea.
“We are developing, I hope, a new cadre of newspaper readers,” he said. “My guess is, as our readers grow older, they may turn to a newspaper like the New York Times, the Daily News, or the New York Post, which are focused on an older audience.”
But New York’s other commuter daily, AM New York, takes offense at the “training wheel” theory. In comparison to Metro -- and to other commuter dailies throughout the country – the paper sees itself as doing the job of a conventional newspaper, albeit on a much smaller scale. (Its masthead lists nine editors and two reporters.)
Russell Pergament, AM New York’s publisher, keeps a thick stack of newspaper clippings in his office. Within minutes, he fills the conference table with them – each one a story that his paper broke, with copies of stories that other newspapers wrote after picking up the leads – as he explains what he thinks a newspaper should do.
“When I was a kid, I ran a paper out of my garage. We got people run up the river,” says Pergament. At AM New York, he is most proud of a story that served a similar purpose, by exposing mismanagement of the Statue of Liberty Foundation. After AM New York broke the story, the New York Times quickly turned it into a front-page feature, sparking a federal investigation.
“Based on the work [we’re] doing, it is a good newspaper, forget the qualifying â€free’,” said Pergament. “And I hope that by the fall we’ll be a very good newspaper.”
There isn’t an agreed-upon length of time that it takes for a new newspaper to take hold in the city, either as a financial success or as a significant political presence.
The New York Sun, which started more than two years ago and claims 53,000 readers, seems willing to lose money for years to come in order to establish itself as a conservative alternative to the Times.
“Success will be measured by two things: whether we make money, and whether we meet our idealistic goals,” said the Sun’s publisher, Seth Lipsky. "We're a long way from both.”
But analysts seem doubtful that the publishers of AM New York and Metro will tolerate losing money for much more than three years. And it is too soon to judge whether the new newspaper model will have much of an effect on other papers in the city, or on how New Yorkers get their news.
As for the competing commuter dailies, each one insists that it is not in competition with the other, though everyone else agrees that they are, and expresses doubt that both will last.
That said, many believe that one of them will make it. Like all New York newspapers, after all, they do have at least one thing working in their favor.
“Everyone needs to read on the subway," said Smith. "What else can you do? Cell phones don’t work.”
Â