How did you have the gumption to start a newspaper in a difficult market like New York?
People said we were nuts, but we were too into it to even listen. We wanted to reach people in their 20s – and we succeeded. The average age of amNewYork readers was in the high 20s.
How did you succeed in reaching this group?
First of all, by distributing on college campuses. And second, by getting people on the go-to-work commute. We knew where young people got on and off the trains, and we tailored our distribution to those areas. Eighty percent of the people coming into Manhattan come in on mass transit. This paper was aimed at Manhattan, and it became the number-one paper in Manhattan with a circulation of 330,000.
The Sun, a conservative New York newspaper founded a year before you launched amNewYork, ceased publication in 2008 for financial reasons. As someone who leans right politically, did you ever say to yourself, “Maybe I should call up The Sun’s publisher, Seth Lipsky, and help him save this paper”?
Before I started amNewYork, I was asked by some of the owners of the paper to look into how I might assist The Sun, but that didn’t really go anywhere…
Look, I think The Sun was a remarkable newspaper with coverage that surpassed that of The New York Times. But the focus there always appeared to be content and not so much sales and distribution. They did not want to go free. I think they could have been very successful if they had made it a long-tab size and distributed it in appropriate areas in the city, but that never appealed to them.
I think Seth Lipsky is amazing, but it just drives home the point that newspapers have a lot of moving parts. It’s not just content and design. It’s distribution, it’s ad sales, it’s community relations – it’s a lot of things that have to be packaged into one organic newspaper.
Your latest venture is JNS, a Jewish news wire service you started in 2011. What drove you to enter the Jewish news business?
Well, I have a background in wire services. I’m one of the owners of a couple of wire services in Massachusetts and Florida that go to hundreds of newspapers, so I understand the business. I never had much to do with Jewish newspapers, but some of the board members at JTA asked me if I could look over their operation and offer some advice. I made some suggestions that didn’t really grab them, and then some of the guys on the board said, “Look, why don’t we start our own?”
There was a personal motivation as well. Media coverage of Israel around the world is not merely unfriendly but reflexively hostile. There almost is a conspiracy in the media to somehow delegitimize Israel and make it hesitant and ashamed to use its legitimate means of self-defense. In some ways, it’s like liberal media are trying to impose an externally imposed unilateral disarmament on Israel. That troubled me a lot.
Even more troubling is that in newspaper coverage there’s very little context provided. Israel is the size of New Jersey, the armistice lines are only eight miles from Tel Aviv, it’s been invaded four times by seven Arab armies, the Hamas charter calls for the destruction of Israel, and there are six million Jews in Israel versus 370 million Arabs around the world. When people understand that, it’s much harder to envision Israel as a monolithic Nazi-like war machine.
We weave all these educational, irrefutable, simple core facts material into a lot of our coverage to kind of fortify our readership with some reality basing.