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Herald Sun
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The Herald Sun is a morning tabloid newspaper based in Melbourne, the state capital of Victoria Australia. It is published by The Herald and Weekly Times Ltd, a subsidiary of News Limited and owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. It primarily serves Melbourne and the rest of the state of Victoria, and shares many articles with other News Limited paid daily newspapers, especially those from Australia.
The Herald Sun is the highest-circulating daily newspaper in Australia, with a weekday circulation of 551,100 and readership of 1,500,000.
Herald Sun newspaper was formed in 1990 from a merger of the morning tabloid paper The Sun News-Pictorial with its afternoon broadsheet sister paper The Herald.
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Encyclopedia
The Herald Sun is a morning tabloid newspaper based in Melbourne, the state capital of Victoria Australia. It is published by The Herald and Weekly Times Ltd, a subsidiary of News Limited and owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. It primarily serves Melbourne and the rest of the state of Victoria, and shares many articles with other News Limited paid daily newspapers, especially those from Australia.
The Herald Sun is the highest-circulating daily newspaper in Australia, with a weekday circulation of 551,100 and readership of 1,500,000.
Origins
The Herald Sun newspaper was formed in 1990 from a merger of the morning tabloid paper The Sun News-Pictorial with its afternoon broadsheet sister paper The Herald. It was first published on 8 October 1990 as The Herald-Sun. The hyphen in its title was later dropped; the last hyphenated masthead appeared on May 1 1993.
History
The Herald
The Herald was founded on 3 January 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. From 1869, it was an evening newspaper. Colonel William Thomas Reay was sometime literary editor and later associate editor, before becoming managing editor in 1904.
The Sun News-Pictorial
The Sun News-Pictorial was founded on 11 September 1922, and bought by the The Herald and Weekly Times in 1925.
The merger
In its heyday, The Herald had a circulation of almost 600,000, but by the time of its 150th anniversary in 1990, with the impact of evening television news and a higher proportion of people using cars to get home from work, The Herald's circulation had fallen below 200,000. This was much less than that of the morning Sun.
As a result, The Herald and Weekly Times decided to merge the two, and so after one hundred and fifty years, ten months and two days of publication, The Herald was published for the last time as a separate newspaper on 5 October 1990. The next day, The Sun News-Pictorial published its last edition. Shortly before this, the Sunday editions of the two newspapers had been merged. The resulting newspaper had both the size and style of The Sun.
Print editions
Like most morning newspapers, Herald Sun was released as a number of editions throughout the day. However after mX became established in the early 2000s, a give-away afternoon newspaper also by The Herald and Weekly Times, the afternoon edition was scrapped.
Collectible items
Over the years, the Herald Sun has had a range of magazines, pins and memorabilia (usually with an outside partner) that could be obtained by either getting it out of the newspaper, or using a token from the newspaper to collect or purchase the item. Items that have been a part of this scheme include:
- The 2000 Olympic Torch Relay Pin (and album), collection includes 15 place pins and one State Pin of Victoria (2000)
- Australian Football League trading cards – every year, near the start of the AFL season (2004-present)
- Simpsons pins (2006)
- Socceroos medallions (2006)
- Celebrate 50 Years of TV (2006) – in conjunction with Nine Network
- The Ashes series pins (2006)
- Family Encyclopedia CD-ROM Collection (2006) – in conjunction with publishing company Dorling Kindersley
- The Greatest (2007) – a 14-part magazine series
- Amazing Pictures (2007) - a 4-part magazine series
Criticisms
Critics say that the Herald Sun exhibits a right-wing bias, with some arguing that it reflects the view of Rupert Murdoch, who is the chief executive officer of Herald Sun's parent company. In reference to this perceived bias, some have taken to calling it "The Hun" (for example, ABC TV's Media Watch, on 1 May 2006).
Shortly before the 2004 election, the Herald Sun published an article entitled "Greens back illegal drugs" (Herald Sun, 31/8/2004) written by Gerard McManus which made a number of claims about the Australian Greens based on their harm minimisation and decriminalisation policies posted on their website at the time. The Greens complained to the Australian Press Council, not least of all because they updated said policies on their website prior to the story even being. The reads:
- In the context of an approaching election, the potential damage was considerable. The actual electoral impact cannot be known but readers were seriously misled. [...] The claims made in the original article were seriously inaccurate and breached the Council's guiding principles of checking the accuracy of what is reported, taking prompt measures to counter the effects of harmfully inaccurate reporting, ensuring that the facts are not distorted, and being fair and balanced in reports on matters of public concern.
The newspaper published what the Greens saw as an unenthusiastic apologetic of the original article. Claims have been made that the paper has a strong bias in favour of the Liberal Party The columnist Andrew Bolt often takes controversial positions, and attracts anger from the left and centre of the political spectrum. John Pilger has described him as "the lowest of journalism's low, an extreme right wing and aggressively idiotic member of Murdoch's dominant press group in Australia".
Notable journalists and columnists
External links
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- segment aired 1 May 2006, ABC. "Age vs. Hun: Off-field Biff". Video accessed online 6 June 2006.
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