Herald Sun
The Herald Sun, including its Sunday edition, Sunday Herald Sun is a 7-day conservative daily tabloid newspaper based in Melbourne, Australia, published by The Herald and Weekly Times, a subsidiary of News Corp Australia, itself a subsidiary of the American Murdoch owned News Corp. The Herald Sun primarily serves Melbourne and the state of Victoria and shares many articles with other News Corporation daily newspapers, especially those from Australia.
It is also available for purchase in Tasmania, the Australian Capital Territory and border regions of South Australia and southern New South Wales such as the Riverina and the South Coast, and is available digitally through its website and apps. In 2017, the paper had a daily circulation of 350,000 from Monday to Friday.
The Herald Sun newspaper is the product of a merger in 1990 of two newspapers owned by The Herald and Weekly Times Limited: the morning tabloid paper The Sun News-Pictorial and the afternoon broadsheet paper The Herald. It was first published on 8 October 1990 as the Herald-Sun.
History
''The Herald''
The Herald was founded on 3 January 1840 by George Cavenagh as the Port Phillip Herald. In 1849, it became The ''Melbourne Morning Herald. At the beginning of 1855, it became The Melbourne Herald before settling on The Herald from 8 September 1855 - the name it would hold for the next 135 years. 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. When The Argus newspaper closed in 1957, The Herald and Weekly Times bought out and continued various Argus media assets. In 1986, The Herald Saturday edition, The Weekend Herald'' was closed.''The Sun News-Pictorial''
The Sun News-Pictorial was founded on 11 September 1922, and bought by The Herald and Weekly Times in 1925.Merger to form the ''Herald-Sun''
In its prime, 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 rather than public transport, The Herald circulation had fallen below 200,000. This was much less than that of the morning Sun.With the only alternative option being to close The Herald, The Herald and Weekly Times decided to merge the two newspapers. 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. The Sunday editions of the two newspapers, the Sunday Herald and the Sunday Sun, were also merged to form the Sunday Herald Sun. The resulting newspaper had both the size and style of The Sun News-Pictorial. Bruce Baskett, the last Editor of The Herald, was the first Editor of the Herald-Sun.
The hyphen in its title was dropped after 1 May 1993 as part of an effort to drop the overt reminder of the paper's two predecessors that the hyphen implied, and also by the fact that by 1993, most of the columns and features inherited from The Herald and The Sun News-Pictorial had either been discontinued or subsumed completely in new sections.
After a progressive decline in circulation the afternoon edition was cancelled, the last edition being published on 21 December 2001. The News Corp Australia-produced mX had filled part of that gap, being freely distributed in the afternoon from stands throughout the Melbourne CBD until its closure on 12 June 2015, though it was generally not available outside that area.
Recent editors include Peter Blunden, Simon Pristel, Phil Gardner and Bruce Guthrie.
Circulation
In 2017, the Herald Sun was the highest-circulating daily newspaper in Australia, with a weekday circulation of 350,000, and claimed a readership of 1.26 million.According to third-party web analytics providers Alexa and SimilarWeb, Herald Sun's website is the 74th- and 125th-most-visited in Australia, respectively, as of August 2015. In 2015, SimilarWeb rated the site as the 15th-most-visited news website in Australia, attracting almost 6.6 million visitors per month.
Journalists
The below is a list of Herald Sun journalists.| Name | Role | Other roles | Start year at Herald Sun / NewsCorp |
| Genevieve Alison | Chief of Staff | Court reporter | |
| Ashley Argoon | Court reporter | ||
| Laura Armitage | Senior News Reporter | ||
| Dan Batten | Digital Sports Reporter | ||
| Ed Bourke | Sports reporter | ||
| Liam Beatty | Journalist | ||
| Mark Buttler | Police reporter | ||
| Andrew Bolt | Columnist | ||
| Kara Monssen | Food and wine editor | Victorian editor of the annual delicious.100 restaurant guide | |
| James Campbell | National weekend political editor | ||
| Alesha Capone | Real Estate journalist | ||
| Patrick Carlyon | Columnist | ||
| Alice Coster | Page 13 editor and columnist | ||
| John Dagge | Workplace reporter | ||
| Shannon Deery | State Politics Editor | ||
| Craig Dunlop | Chief of Staff |
Federal Election Endorsements
Ethics and coverage controversies
LGBTI people and issues
On 9 June 2021, Sydney University researcher Alexandra Garcia published a corpus linguistics analysis of reporting about LGBTI Australians by the Herald Sun and affiliated Newscorp mastheads the Daily Telegraph and The Australian. Following an analysis of more than one million published words, Garcia concluded that the Herald Sun and its associated publications covered transgender people and issues substantially more than any other organisation, and the coverage was found to be overwhelmingly negative, with more than 90% of articles representing transgender Australians in a strongly negative light. The research found that the publication of Advisory Guidelines by the Australian Press Council had not improved the standard of reporting, with most reports and columns being characterised by fear-mongering, misrepresentation of medical science, divisive rhetoric, derogatory language, and suppression and under-representation of the voice of transgender people.The analysis followed similar work by LGBTI rights watchdog, Rainbow Rights Watch, in 2017—which analysed more than 8 million published words which found that reporting in Australian press publications Daily Telegraph, Herald Sun, and The Australian—were calculated to inflame fear, uncertainty, and confusion about transgender people and issues, and that the Australian Press Council was ineffectual at upholding long-term balance and good media ethics.
On 21 January 2021, the Herald Sun published a factual report by journalist Serena Seyfort concerning a woman accused of detonating a Molotov cocktail in a Melbourne suburb. The article included prominent and repeated references to the transgender status of the accused in the sub-headline and throughout the body of the article, also describing the woman using her former name without any obvious public interest justification. On 21 July 2021, the Australian Press Council concluded that the article breached media ethics standards, saying: "publishers should exercise great care not to place unwarranted emphasis on characteristics such as race, religion, nationality, country of origin, gender, sexual orientation, marital status, disability, illness or age".