By 1990 Sun founder and editor Sy Safransky was pleased with how the magazine had grown — more than ten thousand readers now subscribed — but a decision he’d made at its inception in 1974 nagged at him: to carry advertisements in The Sun. After several meetings with the magazine’s business manager, and then several more, Sy finally decided to stop selling ads. June 1990 was the first ad-free issue.
Only a few years earlier he’d been doing basically whatever he could to raise money: exhortations for donations in nearly every editor’s note; benefit yard sales with baked goods; digging ditches. A decade earlier a group of business students had studied the magazine’s finances and concluded it wouldn’t last another twelve months. Abandoning advertiser revenue easily could have brought The Sun to an end. It wasn’t a decision he made lightly.
