The Pink Paper, Britain’s only national weekly newspaper for the gay community, had closed. Conversely, Saga, the group providing various services for the over-50s and publishers of an eponymous, thriving, monthly magazine, has been sold for £1.35bn.The demise of the 17-year-old weeklywas, according to its publishers, due to the emergence of gay internet sites that shredded the paper’s advertising income. As for its competitors, only the Daily Star on Sunday, embarrassingly under-resourced but snaffling a downmarket readership with soaps, “stunnas” and free pints of beer, can celebrate a year-on-year increase.Meanwhile, Trinity Mirror’s double-act of the Sunday Mirror and The People drifts towards the sunset, with a profits-hungry management failing to provide the kind of investment or encouragement that might enable the titles to escape from the News of the World’s shadow. On a Sunday when the NoW, at 80p, delivered a 96-page paper plus a 24-page football insert, a 40-page television listings guide, a 64-page magazine and a free CD – who could resist “Sex and the CD”? – its lookalike, read-alike rivals were anorexic by comparison.Last month the Mirror group announced The People was to lose 16 journalists so more could be spent on marketing aids, presumably of the free CD or beer variety. Over the years, with the relaxation of trading and licensing laws, the nature of the day itself has changed.

Competition for the reader’s time from a myriad of television channels is overwhelming. The world-wide web has spun seductively into the homes of those who once wouldn’t boil a kettle until the newspapers arrived.Far from Sunday being a day of rest, for the national press it has meant working harder than ever to offer readers irresistible inducements to stay loyal Only they haven’t. In terms of editorial content, the Sunday diet is much as it has been for years, except that there is more of it. My friend’s Sunday Times may have been useful had he wanted to construct a model of the Great Wall of China, but rarely offered anything he felt was absolutely essential to read.But, if the broadsheets are suffering and the mid-market titles moribund – the powerful Mail on Sunday and puny Sunday Express have employed expensive CD give-aways to maintain a false glow of health – the once-astronomical red-tops have haemorrhaged sales.Even the News of the World, king of the hill and with a propensity to break more big stories than the Sunday Times has hot caff?attes, has slipped below the benchmark 4 million figure and looks unlikely to regain it. When they type in a keyword to a search engine they want to know that they are accessing all of the nation’s collections, not just one.”Academics will be delighted if it happens But they are sceptical about the BBC’s motives. Dr Joran Ten Brink of Westminster University says: “People have been knocking on their door for years asking for access to material.

There is a lot that will be very useful for teaching film, history of art, politics and many other subjects. But I suspect they are only being nice to people now because of the discussions surrounding the new charter.”It is a fair point. We have tried to put ourselves in the position of the user, whether it’s an academic or just someone at home. As for The Business, it may boast a circulation inflated to more than 200,000, but it is coming close to giving away more copies than it actually prints.The reasons for the emasculation of what was once a mighty Sunday press have been well documented. A journalist friend tells me he has cut from three to two the number of newspapers he sees on a Sunday.