New Sun, Small Helio

The London Daily Express ignored the birth entirely. The Daily Mail gave it five cool lines, the Daily Telegraph 20. The London Times was the only neighbor to show any cordiality at all. "The Sun has burst forth with tremendous energy," said the Times in an editorial welcoming Britain's first new national daily newspaper in 55 years.*

For an event that had been heralded as the most audacious gamble in Fleet Street's history, it seemed like a very small hello. Against it, the Sun's own birth notice sounded almost shrill. YES, IT'S TIME FOR A NEW NEWSPAPER, it headlined on Page One, as if the fact lay beyond argument. "Look how life has changed. Steaks, cars, houses, refrigerators, washing machines are no longer the prerogative of the 'upper crust,' but the right of all. People believe, and the Sun believes with them, that the division of Britain into social classes is happily out of date."

Coppering a Bad Bargain. The fact was that neither this thesis nor the paper born to support it can lay any serious claim to originality. The Sun is not really a new paper, but a derivative hybrid started by Fleet Street's most ambitious press lord, Cecil Harmsworth King. It borrowed its jaunty makeup and style from King's successful Daily Mirror (5,000,000 copies a day) and owes its very existence to the demise of King's unsuccessful Daily Herald, which ceased publication.

In one sense, the venture was merely King's way of coppering a bad bargain. Three years ago, when he took over Odhams Press Ltd., a magazine-publishing house (TIME, March 10, 1961), he also acquired the Herald, a moribund paper heavily barnacled with Labor Party doctrine. King had no use for it, but the Trades Union Congress, which held a 49% interest in the Herald, exacted from the new proprietor a promise to keep it going for seven years. After sinking upwards of $7,000,000 living up to this pledge, King began looking for a gentleman's way out.

A solution was found for him by Hugh Cudlipp, 51, editorial director of International Publishing Corp., King's parent company. Cudlipp proposed erecting, on the Herald's grave, a paper that would be geared to the Labor Party's future rather than its past. "There's no question whom the Sun will be for," said Cudlipp.

To explore the market potential of a paper addressed to a young, aspiring and pragmatic crowd, King assigned Dr. Mark Abrams, a London sociologist with Fleet Street experience (he once did a survey for the Observer on "the ideal car"). Abrams' findings encouraged King to act. For $200,000, he retired the Trades Union interest in the Herald. It took another $6,000,000 to put the Sun on the street.

Mirror Reflections. Sustained by curiosity value, the paper sold out its debut issue of 3,500,000. Its look was different, if not exactly new, although some of the headlines might have been mirror reflections of the Mirror (I'M NOT PUSHED FOR MONEY SAID THE PRINCESS BUT I'M SIMPLY TIRED OF STAGNATING). In that traditional pasture for British editorials, the center fold, the Sun spread a two-page promotion for Goldfinger, the U.S. film that will have its premiere in London sponsored by Cecil King. Readers curious about the Sun's assessment of the com ing British elections had to wait until page 9, where a story by the Sun's political correspondent added up to the uninformative statement: LIBERALS HOPE TO HOLD THE BALANCE.

Whether this sort of fare could guarantee King a place for his Sun was a question for which only time--and King's millions--could find the answer. But the odds are against it. Fleet Street is contracting rather than growing. Six popular papers have vanished in the last five years, and daily readership is down 600,000 since 1954.

*The Daily Sketch was first published in 1909.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.