There’s lots of talk now that Murdoch is going to sell up his UK newspapers, all his newspapers, and that he’s not going to launch a Sunday edition of The Sun. They may all be true. But if he did any of those, he’d be throwing money away.
Take a look at the readership figures, courtesy of the National Readership Survey – Latest Top line Readership. All the UK newspapers have a Sunday edition, with the exception of the Financial Times. And, with the exception of The Times and the Sunday Times, there’s a close relationship between those who buy the dailies and the Sunday, in terms of numbers, and of their socio-economic group:
To me it’s pretty obvious that the News of the World was, in essence, the Sunday edition of The Sun in all but name. Of course, Murdoch may have bigger fish to fry, but in raw numbers, the way to go is obvious.