Description
The New York Observer was a weekly newspaper printed from 1987 to 2016, when it ceased print publication and became the online-only newspaper Observer. The media site focuses on culture, real estate, media, politics and the entertainment and publishing industries.
History
The Observer was first published in New York City on September 22, 1987, as a weekly newspaper by Arthur L. Carter, a former investment banker. The New York Observer had also been the title of an earlier weekly religious paper founded by Sidney E. Morse in 1823.
In July 2006, the paper was purchased by the American real estate figure Jared Kushner, then 25 years old. The paper began its life as a broadsheet, and was then printed in tabloid format every Wednesday, and currently has an exclusively online format. It is headquartered at 1 Whitehall Street in Manhattan.
Previous writers for the publication include Kara Bloomgarden–Smoke, Kim Velsey, Helen Holmes, Brandon Katz, Erin Taylor, Eric Vilas-Boas, Matthew Kassel, Jillian Jorgensen, Joe Conason, Doree Shafrir, Hilton Kramer, Andrew Sarris, Richard Brookhiser, Michael Tomasky, Azi Paybarah, Ross Barkan, John Heilpern, Robert Gottlieb, Foster Kamer, Nicholas von Hoffman, Simon Doonan, Anne Roiphe, Terry Golway, Ron Rosenbaum, Michael M. Thomas, Philip Weiss, and Steve Kornacki.
Originally, the paper was perhaps best known for publishing Candace Bushnell's column "Sex and the City" about Manhattan's social life, on which the television series Sex and the City is based. It was visually distinctive because of its use of sketch illustrations and salmon-colored newsprint, with the latter compared to the appearance of the Financial Times. Henry Rollins once described it as "the curiously pink newspaper". The paper switched to using white newsprint in 2014.
The fourth and longest-serving editor for the newspaper, Peter Kaplan, left the newspaper on July 1, 2009. Interim editor Tom McGeveran was replaced by Kyle Pope in 2009. Elizabeth Spiers served as editor from 2011 to 2012, followed by interim editor Aaron Gell. In January 2013, publisher Jared Kushner named his longtime friend Ken Kurson, a political consultant, journalist, and author, as the Observer's next editor.
Publication of the weekly print edition ended with the November 9, 2016 issue. Observer Media, the publication's parent company, has continued to publish content on an online site under the masthead "Observer" (dropping "New York" from the name).
The discontinuation of the print Observer came the day after Kushner's father-in-law, Donald Trump (Trump's daughter Ivanka is Kushner's wife), won the 2016 presidential election; Kushner served as a senior adviser in the Trump Administration. Kushner transferred his ownership of Observer Media's remaining online assets into a family trust, through which his brother-in-law Joseph Meyer took over his former role as publisher.
