Wonderful News. Though will the rest of News International be able to survive without it? The Times and Sunday Times lost money.

quick answer.. Yes.

An impressive piece of gesture politics, and no doubt there will be a modest delay before the super soaraway Sun goes 7 days a week.

Most daily newspapers revile their Sunday editions; the Guardian made a spirited attempt to bury the Observer last year for instance. And if Private Eye is to believed, the News of the World and the Sun have spent years working feverishly to rubbish each others stories, spike their scoops, and expose each others celebrity columnists as junkies.

Well it looks like there will be a replacement paper called the Sun on Sunday. The website was registered a couple of days ago. I wonder if the public will treat that paper differently.

quick answer.. probably yes

Differently to say six months ago, or differently to yesterday?

Course there's no reason to assume the NotW's readers will just swap over to whatever NI come up with to replace it. In the meantime they'll have either shifted to another rag or got out of the habit of buying a paper at all. A percentage of them will never come back. This will end up costing NI a lot of money either way.

Unless the Sunday Sun turns up the weekend after next, in which case expect it to get a level of grief the equivalent of being hit by a sizeable meteorite.


Jon

I'm not so sure. The sheep will be feeding in the trough again quite quickly.

Every weekend there isn't a 'NotW replacement', there will be more and more people who go off and find alternatives they stick with. That means lower readership, which means less revenue and lower readership also means less money from advertisers, who will probably now be in a stronger bargaining position anyway.

NI are in somewhat of a no win situation here. Launch The Sun on Sunday too soon and they'll catch a storm of abuse for obviously being duplicitous. Launch it too late and too much of the NotW's established readership will have drifted away to make it sufficiently profitable. I'd say we'll see the TSoS in about a month or so; the only caveat is if the story now moves on and the police/politicians start taking major hits. They can't launch the new paper while the phone hacking story is still front page news, even if they are no longer the immediate target.

Jon

Anybody for the "Sun on Sunday" ? </cynicism>

They're been planning a 7 day run of The Sun for some time now. Very handy.

Perhaps that would start just after the deal, now in September, when he will have less of a stake in the newspaper market and thus make it easier for it to go through? And perhaps the 7 day Sun may start its run after that.

I wonder what effect the share prices going down will have on the cost to RM in buying the rest of BSkyB as well.

Oh dear, I appear to be a tad cynical too.

I realise that this song was aimed at another Mr. Murdoch, (Rupert) but I thought that THIS VIDEO by Queen drummer Roger Taylor was quite apt.

I think that they sacrificed NOTW to 1) buy BSkyB which is much more profitable. 2) to save his son from a criminal record for paying police for information. I think that is why Rebecca Brooks is being saved to act as a firewall to protect the Murdoch's. If they are found to be unfit to run a TV network here it might affect his ability to run a US network.

Yeah we'll just get the "Sun on Sunday", same [LIFTED] different name.