Lipsky is founder of the short-lived New York Sun, the daily newspaper which acted as a right-wing antidote to the New York Times. It kicked around from 2002-2008.

Born in Brooklyn and raised in Massachusetts, Lipsky served as a reporter for military paper Stars and Stripes during the Vietnam War. In 1971, he went to work at the Wall Street Journal, which is where he spent most of the next two decades, managing the Asian edition before moving back to the U.S. to oversee the editorial pages of the international editions. In 1990, he left to launch the English version of The Forward, the century-old Yiddish Jewish paper, where he wore a fedora in the newsroom as a tribute to old-school newspaper journalism. After clashes over the direction of the paper—Lipsky was a conservative, the Forward had a decidedly liberal tradition—he left and in 2002 revived the daily Sun.

The Sun was set up to be a conservative alternative to the New York Times. Funded by a collection of neocons like Michael Steinhardt and Bruce Kovner—and unlike Rupert Murdoch's New York Post which leans right but is also a tabloid and dabbles in scandal—the Sun was established to provide a "serious" conservative viewpoint, and most of the editorials were written by Lipsky himself to ensure the paper's editorial voice jibes with the owners' stances. It became quickly apparent, though, the Sun had a tough time making a dent. The paper quickly shuttered in 2008, and Lipsky has been spending his days as a faculty member at Columbia Journalism School. [Image via Getty]