Sunday Papers

When I was a kid, decades ago, the Sunday newspaper was a banquet. We'd spread sections around the family and gorge on it for what seemed like hours. Special features, long stories, extra advertising—it was a feast, and newspaper editors worked hard to produce Sunday papers that really were something special, taking advantage of readers' extra weekend leisure time.

Except for the Sunday New York Times, what Sunday newspaper truly is worth settling down with these days? Most of the ones I see are slightly expanded—if that—versions of their daily counterparts, perhaps with a couple extra pages of sports and business coverage, maybe a painfully thin book review section, and occasionally a meager, irrelevant Sunday magazine. Oh yeah, the TV book, but those are anachronism in this world of digital TV schedules. Take away the coupons, and there's just not much there for Sunday readers.

It's as if papers aren't even trying to be special on Sunday anymore (even though they're charging two or three times as much for the Sunday paper). Frankly, any given section of the Sunday New York Times has more interesting, readable stories than the entirety of most metro Sunday papers. It used to be, for most papers, that the Saturday paper was meager and Sunday was the flagship. Now it's hard to tell the too apart.

What happened? Am I just overly nostalgic for the Sunday read? Have budget cuts taken their greatest tolls on Sunday papers? Do newspaper publishers and editors somehow not understand that there's a potential market in providing a meaty paper for readers with time on their hands on Sundays? Or is that leisure time a myth? (Not if you judge by circulation figures, which invariably are higher on Sundays. The audience is there, and not being served.)

In Europe, some papers are dropping their Sunday editions entirely. Maybe it's time for papers in the U.S. to take a hard look as well—or at least not charge premium prices for what is clearly not a premium product.

And here's a variation on this topic: What are newspaper Web sites doing to make themselves special to weekend readers? Is it worth trying to create the online equivalent of the great Sunday papers of yore, maybe with lots of video, interactive features, discussions, etc.? Even more so than in print, newspaper Web sites look pretty much exactly the same on Sunday as they do the other five days of the week.

Web audiences are different on the weekend than they are during the week—smaller, but home-based rather than visiting from work, and thus probably interested in different sorts of coverage and services. Serving them is an interesting challenge, and I'm not aware of a newspaper site that's tried to differentiate its Sunday or weekend offering the way the newspapers do in print—or at least the way they used to!

Comments

[Mary Specht]

"Is it worth trying to create the online equivalent of the great Sunday papers of yore, maybe with lots of video, interactive features, discussions, etc.?"

That's an excellent idea. Sunday should be a day to launch ambitious and experimental multimedia packages. I find some of these packages take a while to explore, and running them on Sundays means readers have time to take full advantage of them. Good point.

[Charlie Barthold]

I look at it differently. Circ may be up on Sundays but my sense is only from momentum. I am a hard core newspaper reader but I have less and less time to read the Sunday NY Times. Perhaps being a father of four kids has something to do with this but my mother in law research shows fewer and fewer people reading the Times in my neck of the woods even though it lands in their driveway. Thus, I would figure out when (if?) people have time to read the paper and bulk up then.

[Darian]

Anecdotally, most of my friends only buy the Sunday paper and not weekday editions. Part of this is still that comfort experience of breakfast and a paper leisurely eaten and read. Part of it ties into the features that are unavailable during the week (coupons, real-estate house openings, randon music reviews, randon restaurant reviews, feature expanded op-ed and features).

Those are the items we don't have time for during the week (for instance, during the week I don't want to read a review of a random restaurant, instead I'm looking for a review of a specific one or specific type).

I wonder how quickly our generation will fall out of even that paper-only-on-Sunday practice. As more online sites offer interesting day-of-week content I imagine it will happen more rapidly. For my part, Sunday is probably the day I use the internet least to get news and info. We'll see how that changes over the coming months/years...

[DougKelly]

The report from the Cleveland HQ is mixed: 50% of the time, the Sunday Plain Dealer is worth only the coupons in it (and I don't even use those).

But, the other half of the time, the Sunday PD is rich with stories, ideas, trends that I don't see in the weekly version. In fact, just this past weekend alone I found at least 5 of the sections had articles of good value to me.

[Daniel]

I agree on Potts' words. Here in Argentina, sunday newspapers increases his sales volume in a 100%. In that day, the paper weight is double, too. And in sundays, papers has special sections on investigative reports, signed by the most prestigious journalists. Even here is a newspaper printed just in sundays, called Perfil.
We are glad because that new trend has not came here. Yet.