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Media
Sun On Sunday to launch next weekend
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 20 February 2012
Oh, The Sun On Sunday, who knew? Yes, people, News International may have spent months officially denying that a Sunday edition of its infamous red top was in the pipeline, to carry on where disgraced sister title News Of The World left off when it was blown up last July, but we all knew it was very much on the agenda, didn’t we?
And while News International bosses presumably thought last August – a logical time to launch a Sunday Sun as the new football season always results in a sales spike for the weekend tabloids – was slightly too soon to go live with the new title, given the political sensitivities around the events that led to the closure of the NOTW, seemingly seven months is sufficient for us all to forgive and forget. Oh well, at least it means the new Sun On Sunday will be able to cover Charlotte Church’s phone hacking lawsuit when it reaches court in the next few weeks.
News International, of course, registered a handful of relevant internet domains for the Sun On Sunday within 48 hours of announcing the News Of The World would close when the phone hacking scandal went nuclear last summer (it can’t use the name Sunday Sun because there already is a newspaper using that name the North East of England). And while for some time News International insisted no actual plans for a Sunday edition of The Sun were being actively considered, rumours that said plans were now very much underway escalated in recent weeks.
Then Rupert Murdoch told his staff on Friday that a Sun On Sunday launch was imminent, and that was translated into “we launch next weekend” late last night, with The Sun splashing the news it would now have a Sunday edition as its front page story today, rather amusingly billed as “another Sun exclusive”.
There’s an interesting back story to all this, in that the prospect of News International launching a Sunday edition of The Sun was on the agenda a long time before the phone hacking scandal caused the NOTW to close.
With print edition sales plummeting, ad revenues wobbling, and websites generating traffic but not serious income, all newspaper groups are looking for major savings at the moment, and ending the luxury of having separate editorial teams for daily and Sunday editions of the same title is a logical way to go, even if a Sunday newspaper arguably has a different feel and role to a daily, which is possible mainly because it is produced by a team working on a seven day rather than 24 hour production cycle.
As a result, all newspaper owners have been slowly integrating elements of the teams who produce their respective daily and Sunday editions. Doing so, though, is plagued with internal politics, and is all the more tricky for those papers whose Sunday titles have a totally different brand name (so The Sun/News Of The World and The Guardian/The Observer). Former News International chief Rebekah Brooks – axed for her role overseeing the phone hackers during her time editing NOTW – had been busy grappling with how to merge her company’s two tabloids before the Hackgate scandal exploded, taking the Sunday paper and her CEO job with it.
Although closing the News Of The World in the way News International did last July was both expensive and embarrassing, and arguably didn’t diffuse the hacking scandal in the way the newspaper company clearly hoped it would, there is a big up side. It has enabled the creation of a seven-day-a-week tabloid, allowing News International to try to claw back a share of the Sunday newspaper market, but without the cost of operating two stand-alone titles – and without going through the time consuming and costly process of merging the two paper’s teams in an organic way.
Ironically, Murdoch presented the launch of a Sunday edition of The Sun as a positive to the paper’s staff on Friday, a vote of confidence to boost morale after a number of arrests of key Sun journalists over allegations they paid police officers for stories; arrests enabled by the assistance of a new standards unit at NI, which has a brief to help uncover and expose past dodgy activities at the newspaper firm in a bid to repair the reputation of News Corp’s UK division.
It’s a clever move – assuming any Sun journalists buy it – because by all rights Murdoch should be apologising to his staff for forcing them to produce an extra edition every week, without the full resources and budget that were previously made available to the NOTW. But instead the launch of the Sun On Sunday has been spun as something journalists there should be celebrating, because it shows the news mogul’s “unwavering support” for the title.
Quite what form the Sun On Sunday will take remains to be seen, though Murdoch himself is expected to stay in London this week to oversee its launch, and Fabulous magazine – the former NOTW supplement that has been included with the Saturday Sun since that paper’s demise – is expected to return to the Sunday slot.
If the Sun On Sunday can woo those former News Of The World readers who didn’t immediately switch to a rival title (which is the majority of them, the Mirror and Daily Star Sunday did see a post-NOTW circulation uplift, but many of the 2.7 million people who bought the former Sunday were unaccounted for), it will be good news for those in consumer and entertainment PR whose clients, while never too keen to be on the receiving end of NOTW hate, recognised the influence the tabloid had on a large audience, making it a useful tool when it was being positive about your products or people.
