The Sunday Times is a Sunday
broadsheet newspaper, distributed in the
United Kingdom.
The Sunday Times is published by
Times Newspapers Ltd, a subsidiary of
News International, which is in turn owned by
News Corporation. Times Newspapers also owns
The Times, but the two papers were founded independently and came under common ownership only in 1966.
Rupert Murdoch's News International acquired the papers in 1981. Each year the Sunday Times publishes a
Rich List — which boosts sales.
While its sister paper,
The Times, holds a substantially smaller circulation than the largest-circulation UK quality daily,
The Daily Telegraph,
The Sunday Times occupies a dominant position in the quality Sunday market; its 1.3m circulation equals
The Sunday Telegraph, The Observer and
The Independent on Sunday combined. It maintains the larger
broadsheet format and has said that it will continue to do so.
Its price increase to £2 from £1.80 in September 2006, the second price rise in two years, has started to cause a slight month-on-month and year-on-year decline in its readership. This has been following a general decline in readership of all Sunday newspapers. To combat this rivals such as
The Independent on Sunday relaunched in June 2007 with a more concise approach to its content and sections, while the
The Observer has relaunched in a
Berliner format with colour throughout all sections.
The launch of new News International printers in mid-2008 has allowed for full colour throughout all pages. The business section's annual Reel Britannia feature, where Hollywood executives vote on the most significant Britons currently working in Hollywood, has extended its editorial reach across North America.
History
The paper was launched as
The New Observer in 1821;
Observer newspaper had been founded in 1791 although the two newspapers were unrelated. It was renamed
The Independent Observer and then in 1822
The Sunday Times, again without any relationship between itself and
The Times.
Rachel Beer acquired the paper in 1893, and
Alfred Harmsworth acquired it in 1908. By 1959 it was part of the Kemsley group of newspapers, which was acquired in that year by
Lord Thomson. In 1966 Thomson also acquired
The Times and formed Times Newspapers Ltd to publish the two papers.
Rupert Murdoch's News International acquired the
Times titles in 1981, but the Conservative government never referred the purchase to the
Monopolies and Mergers Commission, mainly because the previous owners,
The Thomson Corporation, had threatened to close the papers down if they were not taken over by someone else within an allotted time, and it was feared that any legal delay to Murdoch's takeover might lead to the two titles' demise. This was despite the fact that the takeover gave Murdoch the control of four national newspapers;
The Times,
The Sunday Times,
The Sun and the
News of the World. News Corp also owns the
Fox Network. News International is the majority shareholder of
BSkyB and
James Murdoch is CEO.
Control by News Corporation ended the editorial reign of
Harold Evans, bringing to a close a period in the paper's history when it was a leading campaigning, investigative and liberal-leaning newspaper. Under
Andrew Neil's editorship in the 1980s and early 1990s,
The Sunday Times took a strongly
Thatcherite and
Wienerite slant, and became particularly strongly associated with the view that anti-
commercialism among those who traditionally voted for the
Conservative Party had actually worked alongside traditional
socialism in undermining the UK's economic competitiveness. In this area it strongly opposed the
traditional conservatism expounded by
Peregrine Worsthorne at the rival
Sunday Telegraph.
Major stories
It published the faked
Hitler Diaries (1983), believing them to be genuine. Other notable stories include:
- Israeli Nuclear Weapons—using information from Mordechai Vanunu, The Sunday Times in 1986 published information that said that Israel had manufactured more than 100 nuclear warheads.
- Uncaring Thatcher—The Sunday Times ran a story claiming that Queen Elizabeth II was upset with the style of Margaret Thatcher's leadership. This was notable as the monarch generally maintains a strictly impartial role in UK politics.
- The "cash-for-questions" investigation under John Major's government.
- On 12 July 1987 The Sunday Times began serialisation of the book Spycatcher, the memoirs of an MI5 agent, which had been banned in the UK. The paper successfully challenged subsequent legal action by the UK government, winning its case at the European Court of Human Rights in 1991.
- Over two years in the early 1990s the paper published a series of lengthy articles rejecting the role of HIV in causing Aids, calling the African Aids epidemic a myth. The articles were based on interviews with well-known Aids denier, Peter Duesberg. In response, the journal, Nature, published an editorial describing the paper's coverage as "seriously mistaken, and probably disastrous".
The Sunday Times publishes The
Sunday Times Rich List, an annual survey of the wealthiest people in Britain and Ireland, equivalent to the
Forbes 400 list in the USA, and a series of league tables with reviews of private British companies, in particular the
Sunday Times Fast Track 100. The paper also publishes an annual
league table of
British universities and a similar one for
Irish universities. It also publishes the
Sunday Times Bestseller List of bestselling books in Britain. The Sunday Times also publishes a list on the
100 best UK-based companies to work for.
Irish edition
During the 1990s the paper developed a separate version for the
Republic of Ireland. A Dublin office was opened in 1993, run by Alan Ruddock and John Burns. Originally the Irish edition extended to little more than a small number of news stories, some columnists such as
Eoghan Harris, and the inclusion of Irish cinema listings and schedules for
RTÉ One and
RTÉ Two in the
Culture section of the paper; but by 2005, a separate printing plant, journalistic offices, and many Irish journalists including
Liam Fay,
Richard Oakley,
Mark Tighe and
Colin Coyle who write solely for the Irish edition have led to most of the main news section as well as all other sections being editionalised for Ireland.
The Irish edition of
The Sunday Times is not linked to
The Irish Times newspaper, which is published Monday to Saturday in Dublin.
The Irish issue sells about 140,000 copies per week across the paper's entire circulation area, which includes a separate edition for Northern Ireland. The current Irish editor is Frank Fitzgibbon, a founder of the
Sunday Business Post.Scottish edition
The paper also runs a Scottish edition for
Scotland. The majority of the articles are the same as the English edition, however the paper does run several stories from Scotland and its headline front page story is normally a Scottish story. The paper also gives Scottish TV schedules and cinema listings as well as having Scottish writers for its opinion section and a magazine for Scotland called 'Ecosse'.
Editors
1824: Clarkson
1835:
1850: E. T. Smith
1858: E. W. Scale
1867:
1881:
See also
