Rupert Murdoch's News of the World Replacement Is Losing Readers

We never thought we'd see the day when pictures of Prince Harry being drunk or a "Sick Nazy Orgy With 5 Hookers" would be held up as a sterling journalistic success, but declining circulation numbers at the Sunday Sun are that bad.

We never thought we'd see the day when pictures of Prince Harry being drunk or a "Sick Nazy Orgy With 5 Hookers" would be held up as a sterling journalistic success, but declining circulation numbers at the Sunday Sun are that bad. It's a sad day in journalism when you have to wax poetic about the editorial choices at the now-shuttered and hacked to death News of the World. Thanks to Murdoch's too-trashy Sunday edition of The Sun, that's now a reality. "Sales of the Sunday edition have fallen 28 percent, from 3.2 million copies sold in the weeks after it first hit the stands in February, to 2.3 million in April, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations," reports The New York Times Amy Chozick. "The News of the World sold 2.7 million copies (or one copy for every 23 people in Britain), in July, when Mr. Murdoch closed the tabloid."  Okay, that's bad--but you could blame the current state of journalism and recession for those numbers, like a lot of other media companies have in the past. Or you could even blame The Sun's hot mess of a homepage (where it's hard to find the Sunday edition--if you do, send your blogger the link).  But what Chozick found, was that it was too, shall we say, déclassé thanks to cover stories about beyond morbidly obese teens and naked random women and their political views. "The Sun brand is very much aimed at the working man ... The News of the World was a one-off weekly picked up by those people but also by the educated middle class who buy The Sunday Times," a media expert told Chozick. "The front page would always have a sensational story that usually involved sex, politics and crime and might have even been true ... The Sun hasn’t been able to repeat that," said another. Sure, there's a bizarre slippery slope of what's defined as class here and it's not like there's are any papers built on the fundamentals of trash that have taken over England ... oh wait.