NO REST ON THE SABBATH
The press: Paul Johnson
sees a turbulent future for Sunday newspapers
ONE of the merits of the Wapping Revolu- tion is that, by making innovation not only possible but reasonably priced, it keeps the national newspaper scene constantly on the move. Managements have to look over their shoulders all the time to see what the Opposition (and intruders) are planning. There is no such thing as complacency these days. The top cats at News Interna- tional, despite the advantages of the Iron Law, must be bitterly regretting Rupert Murdoch's sustained opposition to colour newsprint, now abandoned, which allowed Robert Maxwell to get ahead in his plants. This Sunday, for instance, the People and the Sunday Mirror each carried 11 pages using colour, which made the monochrome News of the World look old-fashioned. But of course it has a colour mag which, though small-format, is a lively paper that gives the NoW a huge competitive advantage. The importance of the colour mag was again demonstrated on 19 June when the Sunday Mirror ran its own for the first time and raised its readership (not circulation) by 1,300,000— or so it claims. But the new mag is only monthly, like the Evening Standard's. The next one is not due till 17 July. In the meantime colour newsprint has to do — plus, in the case of the People, an extra part-colour newsprint section, Go.
The need to have not just a proper magazine but a good one is plainly demon- strated by the success of the Mail on Sunday, whose sales are up nearly 14 per cent on what they were a year ago, while the Sunday Express's are about five per cent down. The Sunday Express Magazine is by no means mediocre: it has some original ideas and excellent writers like Alix Coleman. But the Mail on Sunday's You magazine is simply in a different category. It is not as good as when its creator John Leese was in charge (he is now editing the Standard) and cannot now be regarded as the top colour mag. But it carries heavyweight articles, like this week's investigation of the girl who des- troyed the Korean airliner, and is consis- tently nearly twice the size of its rival. Until recently I would have had no hesitation in calling the Sunday Times Magazine the leader in the field, and its large format, superb quality photographs and confident presentation of serious re- portage help to explain why the Sunday Times is putting on sales so impressively. The last figures I have (for Sunday 12 June) show the Sunday Times up 10 per cent on the same week last year, the Sunday Telegraph down 3.3 per cent and the Observer down nearly eight per cent. However, under its new editor Angela Gordon, and contrary to my own surmise, the Observer Magazine is making an excel- lent comeback. The real test of a colour mag is how strikingly and intelligently it uses its high-quality colour opportunities. The current issue of the Observer Maga- zine scores high on both counts: brilliant deployment of Norman Parkinson's re- trospective portfolio of photos, including a delightfully shocking cover, and an inge- nious series of colour maps to show how the causes of death vary significantly from one region of Britain to another. The new editor has also brought back the best feature in colour magazine journalism, 'A Room of My Own', inexplicably killed by her predecessor. It will not be the fault of its colour mag if the Observer fails to halt the Sunday Times juggernaut.
Where does this leave the Sunday Tele- graph? Not well placed, I fear. The paper itself has never been better, and is now definitely the favourite Sunday reading of the chattering classes, both Right and Left, and (I discover) of the smart money- makers — it has excellent City coverage. But it lacks the back-up of a first-rate colour mag. For many years it had the worst magazine of the lot: stereotyped, unimaginative and — not surprisingly — thin. Since Conrad Black took over and reinvigorated the group, the Telegraph Magazine has improved substantially, and this is reflected in increased advertising revenue and size (84 pages in the current issue, against 92 in the Sunday Times and 76 in the Observer). But it is still easily the least exciting of the three.
Now it is proposed to remove even this slender prop from the Sunday Telegraph. The reasoning behind the move reflects both the economics of publishing and the new mobility. If the Telegraph Magazine is given away free with the Sunday paper, the rates it can charge advertisers are based on a circulation which, for the issue of 12 June, was barely over 700,000. If, on the other hand, it is given away with the Saturday issue of the Daily Telegraph, then the number of copies distributed will be much closer to 1,200,000.
The temptation to switch the mag from Sunday to Saturday is increased by the fact that all quality dailies, except for the Financial Times, are at present running scared of the Independent, and watching its every move. The paper is planning an upmarket Saturday magazine supplement, to be run by the former editor of this journal, Alexander Chancellor, who has been brought back from Washington for the purpose. The Telegraph management believes that by switching their mag they can not only raise more advertising re- venue but block any attempt by the Inde- pendent to pinch their Saturday readers, leaving the Guardian and the Times to bear the brunt of any depredation the Indepen- dent's new mag achieves.
This is a high-risk strategy which is making many people in the Telegraph camp nervous. If the Sunday Telegraph with a magazine is hard put to stay above the 700,000-mark, what will it be like without one? It plans, instead, to have an extra section, with a high intellectual con- tent. Of course, this may turn out to be the most brilliant publishing idea of the de- cade. But all experience so far shows there is no substitute for a proper colour mag in the Sunday field. The general view among journalists is that management is putting the Sunday Telegraph on a commercially dangerous course just when, editorially, it is leading the pack.
To complicate matters, the quality end of the Sunday field has never been less stable. A group of clever fellows, led by Douglas Long, a co-founder of the Inde- pendent, David Blake from the Times Business News, and David Lipsey, a re- fugee from the cannibalised New Society, have set up the Sunday Newspaper Pub- lishing Company, to launch a new Sunday quality on 12 February next year. They calculate there are about 650,000 readers looking for a suitable paper. There is an element of pleasing idealism about them. But they are much more hard-headed, and their business plan far more plausible, than the progenitors and calculations of the disastrous News on Sunday. If they succeed in raising the money and getting into print, there will be extreme turbulence at the top end of the Sunday market, and the Sunday Telegraph, shorn of its mag, will be storm- tossed, to put it mildly. An even more alarming prospect is that the new project will stimulate the Independent to take the logical step and launch a Sunday of its own. That will be bad news for the Observer too. Only the Sunday Times, protected by the Iron Law of Wapping, can face this uncer- tain future without trembling.
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