About Sunday Herald

Sunday Herald

The Sunday Herald was a Scottish Sunday newspaper published in Glasgow, launched on 7 February 1999 by the Scottish Media Group under its founding editor, Andrew Jaspan. Born of the devolution era, in the months before the new Scottish Parliament opened, it set out to be a national paper for a nation redefining itself: centre-left, pro-devolution and proudly controlled from Scotland. In nineteen years it achieved two distinctions no other title could claim. It became the only newspaper to support Scottish independence in the 2014 referendum, and in 2011 it published the Ryan Giggs super-injunction front page that challenged a legal gagging order across the United Kingdom.

The paper's final edition appeared on 2 September 2018, when its owner, Newsquest's Herald and Times Group, replaced it with the Herald on Sunday and the Sunday National. Its closure ended one of the most distinctive experiments in modern Scottish journalism, a paper founded to help shape a devolving nation that ended as the journalistic voice of the independence movement its successor titles inherited.

Launch in the Devolution Era

The Sunday Herald's first edition appeared on 7 February 1999, launched as a broadsheet by Scottish Media Group. The timing was deliberate and historic. Scotland had voted for devolution in 1997, and the Scottish Parliament was to open in Edinburgh in July 1999. The new paper's masthead welcomed readers to no ordinary newspaper and presented it as Scotland's independent newspaper, declaring that it was in the business of nation-making and nation-shaping for the new political era.

The strategy behind the launch was to unite a Scottish readership behind a genuinely national paper, rather than accepting the traditional pattern in which Scottish readers were divided among regional titles and London-based newspapers with Scottish editions. Its founders argued that other papers were directed from London, while the Sunday Herald, like its own group and Dundee's DC Thomson, was controlled in Scotland. From its base at 200 Renfield Street in Glasgow, the paper set out to cover a whole country's Sunday reading with the politics of the new Scotland at its centre.

Andrew Jaspan and the Founding Vision

The founding editor, Andrew Jaspan, was a former editor of The Scotsman, and his appointment signalled the seriousness of the venture. Jaspan shaped the paper as an ambitious, ideas-led Sunday title: broadsheet in format and intent, centre-left in politics and committed to the devolution project as both a news story and an editorial cause. The paper's pro-devolution stance was not a marketing line added later; it was present in the founding proposition that Scotland in 1999 needed a Sunday paper of its own, made in Scotland, for the new constitutional age.

That founding vision gave the Sunday Herald a clarity of purpose unusual in newspaper launches. It knew what it was for. Readers bought not merely a bundle of news, sport and features but a position on the central question of Scottish public life. The strength of that identity sustained the paper through the commercial difficulties that followed, and it also determined the course of its later history, leading logically enough, when the referendum came, to the most consequential editorial decision in the paper's life.

Format Changes and the Magazine Experiment

The paper launched as a broadsheet and remained one until 20 November 2005, when under editor Richard Walker it switched to tabloid format. The change followed the industry-wide movement towards compact sizes, intended to make Sunday papers easier to handle without weakening their content. Walker, who became the defining editor of the paper's second decade, maintained the title's seriousness of purpose in the smaller format.

Further reinvention was considered as the Sunday market contracted. In 2010 reports suggested that the Sunday Herald might be relaunched in a magazine format as Scotland's news magazine, printed on high-quality paper, with a possible change of title. The plan reflected the pressure on a relatively small Sunday title competing against far larger London-based rivals in the Scottish market. The paper in the event continued as a newspaper, but the episode showed how persistently its owners searched for a sustainable form for a distinctive but sub-scale title.

The Giggs Front Page

The Sunday Herald achieved national and international attention on Sunday 22 May 2011, when it published a front page showing the footballer Ryan Giggs with a censored banner across his eyes, in connection with a super-injunction intended to prevent reporting of an alleged affair and even of the gagging order itself. Editor Richard Walker pointed out that the legal order applied in England and Wales, while the Sunday Herald published in Scotland under a separate legal system. Giggs's identity had already been widely circulated online and in football grounds, and on the following day he was named in the House of Commons under parliamentary privilege.

The front page was a landmark in the debate over privacy injunctions and free expression. A relatively small Glasgow Sunday paper had exposed the absurdity of a court order that purported to keep secret what millions already knew, and had done so by relying on the distinct legal jurisdiction in which it published. The episode demonstrated the editorial courage for which the paper was known, and it remains the single most famous edition in the Sunday Herald's history.

Backing Independence in 2014

The paper had supported the Scottish National Party in the Scottish Parliament elections of 2007 and 2011, while maintaining that its news reporting would remain independent and balanced. When the independence referendum of 2014 arrived, the Sunday Herald took the step its founding logic had long implied. In May 2014 it declared for a Yes vote, becoming the first Scottish newspaper to support independence, with a front page designed by the artist and writer Alasdair Gray, a prominent advocate of independence, decorated with a thistle and saltires.

No other newspaper followed it. Its daily stablemate The Herald backed remaining in the United Kingdom, as did The Scotsman and the Sunday Post, while many other titles stayed neutral. The Sunday Herald therefore stood alone as the press voice of the Yes campaign, a position of considerable commercial and political significance. Its publisher allowed its titles' editors freedom to take their own positions on the constitution, and Richard Walker used that freedom to commit his paper wholly to independence, arguing that Scotland should seize the chance to remake its society in a more equal and just form.

The Referendum Sales Surge

The stance brought the paper a remarkable reward in sales. In September 2014, the month of the referendum, the Sunday Herald's sales rose by 111 per cent year on year. Readers who felt their view was unrepresented elsewhere in the press bought the one title that spoke for them, and the paper's editor spoke proudly afterwards of having given a voice to Yes voters. The surge demonstrated the commercial potential of conviction journalism: a clear position, honestly held, could grow a newspaper's audience even in a declining market.

The referendum was lost by the Yes campaign, but the audience the Sunday Herald had gathered did not simply disperse. In November 2014 its publisher launched The National, a daily newspaper explicitly supporting independence, with Richard Walker as its founding editor alongside his Sunday role. The new daily was a direct product of the Sunday Herald's referendum stand, extending the voice it had pioneered from one day a week to six. Few newspapers can claim to have given birth to a sister title out of an editorial campaign.

The Final Editors and Decline

Richard Walker's tenure defined the paper's most famous years, but the title's final editor was Neil Mackay, who led the Sunday Herald from 2015 to 2018. Mackay, a long-serving Herald journalist and author, maintained the paper's independence-supporting, centre-left identity through the difficult years after the referendum, when the extraordinary sales of 2014 subsided and the structural decline of Sunday print resumed. The paper's circulation for July to December 2017 was 18,387, a respectable figure for a Scottish Sunday but far below the level needed to insulate it from its owner's economics.

By 2018 Newsquest's Herald and Times Group was restructuring its Sunday publishing in Glasgow. The group concluded that the market could be served better by two titles than by the Sunday Herald alone: a Sunday edition of The Herald for its traditional readership, and a Sunday edition of The National for the independence-supporting audience the Sunday Herald had created. The paper that had pioneered both constituencies was, in effect, divided between its successors.

Closure and Successors

The final edition of the Sunday Herald appeared on 2 September 2018. In its place the publisher launched the Herald on Sunday and the Sunday National, the latter edited initially by Richard Walker, the Sunday Herald's own former editor. The arrangement preserved both strands of the closed paper's inheritance: the Herald name's Sunday presence, restored after nineteen years, and the pro-independence Sunday voice, transferred to the Sunday National under the man who had created it.

The closure was reported as a business decision in a hard market, but it closed a title of genuine historical significance. Scottish Media Group's 1999 experiment had run for nineteen years, through the opening of the Parliament it was founded to serve, the independence referendum campaign and the most debated front page of the super-injunction era. Its replacements carry parts of its mission, but neither carries the Sunday Herald's particular combination of founding ambition and referendum-era fame.

The Sunday Herald's Place in Scottish Journalism

The Sunday Herald matters to media history for three reasons. It was a rare example of a successful national newspaper launch in the late twentieth century, created for a new political settlement and honest about its nation-shaping purpose. It produced, in the Giggs front page, a defining moment in the British argument over privacy law and free speech. And it altered Scottish politics' media landscape permanently by proving, in 2014, that a substantial audience existed for a pro-independence press, the audience on which The National and the Sunday National were then built.

From Andrew Jaspan's broadsheet of February 1999 to Neil Mackay's final edition of September 2018, the paper lived exactly the life its founders had imagined for it, shorter than they hoped but more eventful than most titles manage in a century. The Sunday Herald was, as its first masthead promised, no ordinary newspaper.