Herald-Sun

The Herald-Sun was formed in 1990 from a merger of the morning tabloid paper The Sun News-Pictorial with its afternoon broadsheet sister paper The Herald.

The Herald was founded on January 3, 1840 by George Cavanaugh as The Port Phillip Herald. In 1855 it became The Melbourne Herald for all of one week before settling on The Herald.

In its heyday The Herald had a circulation of almost 600,000 readers but by the time of its 150th birthday in 1990, with the impact of evening television news and more people using cars as a means for transport rather than trains or trams, The Heralds circulation had fallen to just under 200,000 readers.

The Herald and Weekly Times Ltd was faced with the choice of either closing The Herald which would mean a massive lay off of employees or merging it with its morning sister paper The Sun News-Pictorial and combining the best journalists and features from both papers in a new newspaper. The HWT decided to merge the two and so The Herald was published for the last time as a separate newspaper on October 5, 1990 after one hundred and fifty years, ten months and two days of publication.

The Sun News-Pictorial was founded in 1922 and bought by the HWT in 1925.

Lacking the nude "page 3 girls" of Murdoch's British tabloids, it does possess some of the populist right-wing sensibility (though to a much lesser degree). Its ferocious anti-Labor editorial tone (at the time) is said to have contributed significantly to the downfall of the Labor government of Joan Kirner in 1992, though the extent to which that is true is impossible to estimate.

Its major competitor is the social-democratic-leaning broadsheet The Age, which it outsells substantially (though the demographics of The Age are considerably more appealing to advertisers).

The old Herald and Weekly Times building located in Flinders Street, Melbourne is heritage listed which means the historic exterior facade - the neon HERALD SUN sign and the former radio transmission towers[?] on the roof for radio station 3DB, that was also housed in the building for many years, cannot be removed although the interior of the building was gutted after the HWT moved out in 1995 after seventy-two years in the building.

External links

• Herald-Sun website (http://www.heraldsun.com.au)
• The Port Phillip Herald and The Herald archive 1840 - 1880 (http://portphillipherald.archivepublisher.com/)