The Sun is a
tabloid daily newspaper published in the
United Kingdom and the
Republic of Ireland with the highest
circulation of any daily English-language newspaper in the world, standing at 3,126,866 copies daily in October 2007 and with a daily readership of 7,909,000 in H1 2007. It reaches 2.9 million readers in the
ABC1 demographic and 5.0 million in the
C2DE demographic, compared to the 1.5 and 0.1 million respectively of its upmarket stablemate
The Times. It is published by
News Group Newspapers of
News International, itself a subsidiary of
Rupert Murdoch's
News Corporation.
[1][2]In a 2007 meeting with the House of Lords Select Committee on Communications who were investigating media ownership and the news, Murdoch stated that he acts as a "traditional proprietor"; exercising editorial control on major issues such as which political party to back in a general election or policy on Europe.[3]
It was a broadsheet with a logo featuring an orange disc. The relaunched paper did not live up to IPC's expectations, however. Circulation continued to decline, and it was soon losing even more money than the Herald had lost. In 1969, IPC decided to throw in the towel. Robert Maxwell offered to take it off their hands and retain its commitment to the Labour party, but said there would be redundancies, especially among the printers. Rupert Murdoch had already bought the News of the World, a sensationalist Sunday newspaper, the previous year, and he was in the position of seeing the printing presses in the basement of the old Bouverie Street building sit idle for six days in the week. Seizing the opportunity to increase his presence on Fleet Street, he made an agreement with the print unions, promising fewer redundancies if he got the paper. He assured IPC that he would publish a "straightforward, honest newspaper" which would continue to support Labour. IPC, under pressure from the unions, rejected Maxwell's offer, and Murdoch bought the paper for £800,000, to be paid in instalments. [4] He would later remark "I am constantly amazed at the ease with which I entered British newspapers." [5]
Murdoch appointed Larry Lamb as his editor. Lamb was scathing in his opinion of the Mirror, the paper where he had recently been senior sub-editor. He shared Murdoch's view that the measure of a paper's quality was best measured by its sales, and he regarded the Mirror as overstaffed, and primarily aimed at an aging readership. Lamb hastily recruited a staff of about 125 reporters, who were mostly selected for their availability rather than their ability. [6] This was about a quarter of what the Mirror currently employed, and Murdoch had to draft in staff on loan from his Australian papers. Murdoch immediately relaunched The Sun as a tabloid, and ran it as a sister paper to the News of the World [7]. The Sun used the same printing presses, and the two papers were now managed together at senior executive levels.
