The New York Observer
American weekly newspaper-turned media site

The New York Observer was a weekly newspaper established in 1987. In 2016, 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 alternative 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 164 years before by Sidney E. Morse in 1823.
After almost two decades, in July 2006, the paper was purchased by the American real estate figure Jared Kushner, then only 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 on an internet website. It is headquartered at 1 Whitehall Street in lower Manhattan.
Previous prominent writers for the publication include Joe Conason, Doree Shafrir, Hilton Kramer, Andrew Sarris, Richard Brookhiser, Michael Tomasky, Azi Paybarah, Ross Barkan, John Heilpern, Robert Gottlieb, Nicholas von Hoffman, Simon Doonan, Anne Roiphe, Terry Golway, Ron Rosenbaum, Michael M. Thomas, Philip Weiss, and Steve Kornacki.
The paper published Candace Bushnell's column "Sex and the City" about Manhattan's social life and emotional relationships on which the trend-setting popular television series Sex and the City (later also with two successful feature films) is based.
“The New York Observer” enters the record as american weekly newspaper-turned media site. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what York, Observer and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2038698. VIAF identifies the subject as 177942047. The Library of Congress control number is n2001082177. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1987, 2016, 1823 and 2006.
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This entry incorporates text from “The New York Observer” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.