So what would you do with the Sunday Telegraph..?
08/03/06 08:28 Admin
notes
I see the Sunday Telegraph has lost its editor and
gained a new one according to a report in
today's
Guardian Unlimited
(I haven't seen the hard copy edition yet, it might
well be there too).
To me, the question facing the Telegraph, daily and Sunday incarnations, is how to capitalise on the apparent resurgence of the Conservative Party. Whatever your politics there can be no doubt that intending to vote Conservative isn't the taboo it appeared to be in 1992, when all the polls said Labour would win by a landslide and they didn't. People wouldn't admit they were actually going to vote Conservative, even when talking to anonymous pollsters, and it's taken all this time for someone to address that feeling.
And there are few really Conservative newspapers left. In the eighties everyone bar the Guardian, the Mirror and the Indie appeared to support Margaret Thatcher; although he takes a critical beating there are few people advocating any serious alternative to Tony Blair. Whether David Cameron's credibility is media hype or not remains to be established (and the results of recent byelections suggests he's not shaken the voters up as much as the papers appeared to believe) but his star appears to be rising for the moment. It's no longer embarrassing to be considering voting Tory.
Meanwhile the Telegraph and the Mail are by now the last of the Tory supporters in the mainstream press. Getting rid of the Sunday editor Sarah Sands at such short notice might seem harsh, but now of all times they can't afford to be anything other than very strong indeed. Whether changing the editor will do the trick has yet to be seen; everyone else has changed format, radically, making the Telegraph in both its incarnations look a little elderly. It should be rescuable, and it will be interesting to see whether Patience Wheatcroft is the editor to fix it on a Sunday.
To me, the question facing the Telegraph, daily and Sunday incarnations, is how to capitalise on the apparent resurgence of the Conservative Party. Whatever your politics there can be no doubt that intending to vote Conservative isn't the taboo it appeared to be in 1992, when all the polls said Labour would win by a landslide and they didn't. People wouldn't admit they were actually going to vote Conservative, even when talking to anonymous pollsters, and it's taken all this time for someone to address that feeling.
And there are few really Conservative newspapers left. In the eighties everyone bar the Guardian, the Mirror and the Indie appeared to support Margaret Thatcher; although he takes a critical beating there are few people advocating any serious alternative to Tony Blair. Whether David Cameron's credibility is media hype or not remains to be established (and the results of recent byelections suggests he's not shaken the voters up as much as the papers appeared to believe) but his star appears to be rising for the moment. It's no longer embarrassing to be considering voting Tory.
Meanwhile the Telegraph and the Mail are by now the last of the Tory supporters in the mainstream press. Getting rid of the Sunday editor Sarah Sands at such short notice might seem harsh, but now of all times they can't afford to be anything other than very strong indeed. Whether changing the editor will do the trick has yet to be seen; everyone else has changed format, radically, making the Telegraph in both its incarnations look a little elderly. It should be rescuable, and it will be interesting to see whether Patience Wheatcroft is the editor to fix it on a Sunday.
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