A new Sunday newspaper has pledged to “combine the best” of its weekday edition and a now-defunct sister title after its launch yesterday.
Newsquest launched new papers the Sunday National and The Herald on Sunday yesterday, following the closure of the Sunday Herald the previous week.
The move saw Newsquest’s Glasgow editorial teams become seven-day operations, with The Herald on Sunday being editorially aligned with The Herald, and the Sunday National with pro-Scottish independence daily The National.
The Sunday Herald had previously backed a ‘Yes’ vote ahead of the 2014 independence referendum.
A piece published inside the first Sunday National reads: “We hope you’ll agree that the Sunday National combines the best of the Sunday Herald and the daily National, who have been the only two independence-supporting newspapers in Scotland since the referendum.
“The Sunday Herald may have gone but The National and the Sunday National will continue to represent the movement which grew around the Yes campaign and the growing number of people who agree that independence offers the best prospects for Scotland’s future.”
Elements of the old title which have been transferred to the new Sunday National include its general knowledge crossword and seven days section, while Sunday Herald foreign correspondent David Pratt and food critic Joanna Blythman will also write for the title.
The Herald on Sunday launched with a number of exclusives, including an investigation into Scottish island ferry services being put at risk, a police bid to turn football fans into paid informants and a pay rise plan for teachers. New lifestyle magazine Sunday Life also featured inside both titles
On a slight tangent but relevant to this piece, I believe many local dailies,whose sales figures are dropping week by week to unimaginable lows and whose advertising revenues are forever falling,ought to consider turning from a daily to weekly publication in order to save costs and potentially save long established titles and brands from eventually disappearing.
With online traffic apparently growing while the paid for print audience is shrinking, going weekly in print as a county wide news paper to replace ailing and woeful weekly titles and using the brands web pages for more immediate local news makes sound sense to my way of thinking.
Standing aside and watching the rapid decline gather momentum until titles gradually wither away,having become unprofitable and a liability,cannot be an option any longer, with no sign of a reversal of fortunes ?the Sunday/ weekly option seems to me a good one.
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