THE SUNDAYS AND SATURDAY
SIR,—Mr. Anthony M. Perry's solution for the news- paper crisis—the abandonment of Saturday by the dailies to the Sundays—is admirable if it is agreed by daily newspaper publishers that Saturday has died on us. Examining this situation in the Scotsman three years ago, we came to the conclusion that a more profitable remedy would be for us to move into the Sunday paper area rather than to invite them to move into ours. We set out to produce a Saturday Scotsman which, in the context of a daily paper, would give also the literary and leisure con- tents and the news and political summaries of the quality Sundays, and twenty-four hours earlier. Lately this has become a separate weekend section. Our resourceful advertising staff has won developing revenue support, and determined selling and pub- licity have earned a circulation substantially greater than our daily average for a paper which is the' biggest in size produced in Britain on Saturday.
Newspaper men must refuse to accept that nobody has time to read news or advertisements on Satur- days. As Mr. Perry points out, the weekend starts on Saturday, and Saturday becomes more and more a day of leisure, including (unlike Sunday) shopping.
Perhaps an editor may be permitted to suggest that one of the most grievous burdens carried by the newspapers today is the abject dependence upon the 'cost per thousand' formula dear to some ad-
vertising experts who may have no other ingenuity to offer their clients. It is a crude sort of pseudo- actuarial device which hands over far too great a share of the available advertising revenue to the large and tawdry battalions, and takes far too little account of personality, penetration and authority. —Yours faithfully,
ALASTAIR M. DUNNETP
Editor The Scotsman, Edinburgh
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