The Sun arrived at our house as a Christmas present some ten years ago and we’ve been getting it ever since. I still don’t know what to make of it. It has a tone unlike the tone of any other magazine I’ve read. I think of the Sun as the sad magazine.
“I lay in the dark crying and singing, singing and crying.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
As you might surmise, the Sun and its 75,000 readers aren’t casual acquaintances. The relationship’s so intimate, in fact, that in this catastrophic era for printed journalism I bring the Sun to your attention not for its cathartic value but as a business model. Sy Safransky, the Sun‘s founder, editor, and publisher, doesn’t worry about advertising falling off because the Sun carries none. The readers, almost all of them subscribers, pay the freight.
In 1974, Safransky, then 28, was a former Long Island newspaper reporter who’d done drugs, wandered the world, and gone to North Carolina to live collectively. That didn’t work out, and his thoughts turned back to journalism. Says a brief history posted on the Sun site, “He wanted to start a magazine that would present courageous, honest writing and respect readers in a fundamental way.” He borrowed $50, stapled together 200 copies of the Chapel Hill Sun, and after trying to hawk them for a quarter each eventually gave most away. His advertisers were local merchants.
A few readers “send us letters that say ‘Get off it. Start taking ads.’ But most seem grateful for a publication that isn’t constantly encouraging them up to buy something, go somewhere, or become a better person.”
This other magazine, which Sun readers could feel so grateful the Sun was not, was People—also launched in 1974, and as dependent on newsstand sales as the Sun isn’t.
Will that change? Perhaps with regard to the contemplation of suffering, the mainstream media are just now coming into their own.v
