The Press: Ever on Sunday

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On U.S. journalism's vast landscape dwells a strange colossus—part newspaper, part showman—that has its keepers buzzing with puzzlement and concern. Like churchgoing and weekend barbecues, the Sunday newspaper is a national institution. It is big, boisterous and, for the most part, glowing with financial health. But for all that, it presents a growing problem not only for the men who put it together but for the readers who scatter it across the living-room floor each Sunday. How is the Sunday newspaper changing—and why? What do its editors want it to be? Is it aimed at a readership that no longer exists?

The Sunday newspaper penetrates seven of every ten U.S. households, where it reaches a phenomenal—if not always attentive—readership of 120 million. It comes in all sizes, weights and shapes, from the Juneau, Alaska Empire (circ. 3,050, an average 14 pages) to journalism's undisputed heavyweight champion, the Sunday New York Times, which often runs to 600 pages and tips the scales at 6 Ibs. In the massive Sunday barrage of newsprint, there is something for almost everyone: reprises of old murders, comics, crossword puzzles, fiction, verse, quotations from Scripture, galleries of young ladies recently betrothed, advice on how to pot begonias—and a little bit of news.

Many newspaper publishers question whether such sheer bulk has carried the U.S. Sunday newspaper several compass points off journalism's true course. While the typical metropolitan Sunday paper has grown from 111 to 243 pages in the last 20 years, its news content has shrunk from 11.6% to 6.5%. Unlike its slender—and more single-minded—daily brethren, which are deeply embedded in the work week, the Sunday paper must snare that most elusive of all readers: the American at play. Two-day weekends, new leisure pursuits, and the emergence of television's mesmeric eye all have conspired to pry loose the Sunday paper's once sturdy grip on the nation's off-time mood. "The Sunday newspaper, I'm afraid, is no longer the center of the American Sunday morning," says Scott Newhall, executive editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. "We give our readers 150 reasons why they should do something on Sunday other than read our paper. The Sunday paper has become a guide to other things to do rather than something to do itself."

Facelift for Mammon. The Sunday paper was originally conceived as only a seventh edition of the daily press. Fiercely attacked by clergymen in its formative years—they considered it a Mammon-like rival of the pulpit—it did not succeed in establishing itself until the Civil War generated a ravenous public appetite for news and gave it permanent root. But not until Joseph Pulitzer, already the successful publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, arrived in New York in 1883 did the Sunday paper begin sprouting into the giant it is today. With sensational features, comic strips, four-color illustrations and special-interest supplements, Pulitzer's Sunday World face-lifted Sunday journalism. In this, it had considerable help from William Randolph Hearst, who pitted his New York Journal against the World and trumped Pulitzer's every Sunday trick.