The Press: Heart Trouble at the Sun

London’s first new daily in 56 years, the Sun, is not living up to its sunny billing. The purpose of the paper, announced Cecil King’s editorial chief Hugh Cudlipp last August, will be “to stimulate the modernization of Britin in every sphere and to replace the disillusionment that followed our contraction as a world power by a positive faith in our future.” But the paper was soon contracting like the empire. Circulation, which soared to 3,500,000 at the start, has tumbled to a depressing 1,400,000, only 200,000 above the last days’ circulation of the Sun’s defunct predecessor, the Daily Herald.

“Practically everyone on the paper is looking around for a new job,” says a staffer. The education correspondent recently returned to his old beat on the Times of London; a quartet of reporters hired to make up a so-called “probe team” quit after finding little freedom to probe.

There have been other changes at the Sun; Editor Sydney Jacobson has been moved into the job of editorial director and replaced by his assistant Richard Dinsdale. But in the end, the paper’s survival hinges on how long Press Lord King wants to keep it going, and he does not seem to have his heart in it. That problem was summed up by Christopher Booker in Spectator: “Few magazines or newspapers have ever really been successful unless they have begun with one or two men who really, in their hearts, wanted to say something —and really wanted to make a paper to say it.”