Everything about Sunday Times totally explained
The Sunday Times is a Sunday
broadsheet newspaper distributed in the
United Kingdom and
Republic of Ireland. It is published by
Times Newspapers Ltd, a subsidiary of
News International, which is in turn owned by
News Corporation. Times Newspapers also owns
The Times, but the two papers were founded independently and only came under common ownership in 1966.
Rupert Murdoch's News International acquired the papers in 1981. Each year the Sunday Times publishes a Rich List - which tends to boost sales.
While its sister paper,
The Times, holds a substantially smaller circulation than the largest-circulation UK quality daily,
The Daily Telegraph,
The Sunday Times occupies a dominant position in the quality Sunday market; its 1.3m circulation equals
The Sunday Telegraph, The Observer and
The Independent on Sunday combined. It maintains the larger
broadsheet format and has said that it'll continue to do so.
Its price rise to £2 from £1.80 in September 2006, the second price rise in two years, has started to cause a slight month-on-month and year-on-year decline in its readership. This has been following a general decline in readership of all Sunday newspapers. To combat this rivals such as
The Independent on Sunday relaunched in June 2007 with a more concise approach to its content and sections, while the
The Observer has relaunched in a berliner format with colour throughout all sections.
The launch of new News International printers in Summer 2008 will allow for full colour throughout all pages in the paper.
History
The paper was launched as
The New Observer in 1821, choosing a name similar to the existing
Observer newspaper although the two newspapers were unrelated. It was renamed
The Independent Observer and then in 1822
The Sunday Times, again without any relationship between itself and
The Times.
(External Link
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Rachel Beer acquired the paper in 1893, and
Alfred Harmsworth acquired it in 1908. By 1959 it was part of the Kemsley group of newspapers, which was acquired in that year by
Lord Thomson. In 1966 Thomson also acquired
The Times and formed Times Newspapers Ltd to publish the two papers.
Rupert Murdoch's News International acquired the
Times titles in 1981, but the Conservative government never referred the purchase to the
Monopolies and Mergers Commission, mainly because the previous owners,
The Thomson Corporation, had threatened to close the papers down if they were not taken over by someone else within an allotted time, and it was feared that any legal delay to Murdoch's takeover might lead to the two titles' demise. This was despite the fact that the takeover gave Murdoch the control of four national newspapers;
The Times,
The Sunday Times,
The Sun and the
News of the World. News Corp also owns the
Fox Network. News International is the majority shareholder of
BSkyB and
James Murdoch is CEO.
Control by News Corporation ended the editorial reign of
Harold Evans, bringing to a close a period in the paper's history when it was a leading campaigning, investigative and liberal-leaning newspaper. Under
Andrew Neil's editorship in the 1980s and early 1990s,
The Sunday Times took a strongly
Thatcherite and
Wienerite slant, and became particularly strongly associated with the view that anti-
commercialism among those who traditionally voted for the
Conservative Party had actually worked alongside traditional
socialism in undermining the UK's economic competitiveness. In this area it strongly opposed the
traditional conservatism expounded by
Peregrine Worsthorne at the rival
Sunday Telegraph.
Major stories
It published the faked
Hitler Diaries (1983), believing them to be genuine. Other notable stories include:
Irish Edition
During the 1990s the paper began to develop a separate version for the
Republic of Ireland. A Dublin office was opened in 1993, run by Alan Ruddock and John Burns. Originally the Irish edition extended to little more than a small number of news stories, some columnists such as
Eoghan Harris, and the inclusion of Irish cinema listings and schedules for
RTÉ One and
RTÉ Two in the
Culture section of the paper; but by 2005, a separate printing plant, journalistic offices, and many Irish journalists including
Liam Fay,
Richard Oakley,
Mark Tighe and
Colin Coyle who write solely for the Irish edition have led to most of the main news section as well as all other sections being editionalised for Ireland.
The Irish issue sells about 140,000 copies per week across the paper's entire circulation area, which includes a separate edition for Northern Ireland edited by Liam Clarke. The current Irish editor is Frank Fitzgibbon, a founder of the
Sunday Business Post. For many years, the website of
The Sunday Times carried the main stories from the Irish edition but that now (21 January 2007) seems to have been dropped.
Editors
Joseph Hatton (1874–81)
Rachel Beer (1893–1904)
Denis Hamilton (1961–66)
Harold Evans (1967–81)
Frank Giles (1981–83)
Andrew Neil (1983–1994)
John Witherow (1995– )Further Information
Get more info on 'Sunday Times'.
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