About Sunday Herald Sun

Sunday Herald Sun

Overview

The Sunday Herald Sun is a Sunday tabloid newspaper published in Melbourne, Victoria, and the Sunday edition of the Herald Sun, Australia's highest-selling daily newspaper. Published by The Herald and Weekly Times — a subsidiary of News Corp Australia — it is the dominant Sunday newspaper in Victoria and one of the most-read Sunday titles in the country. Where its weekday sibling chases the news cycle from Monday to Saturday, the Sunday Herald Sun sets the agenda for the week ahead, combining breaking weekend news with investigations, long-form features, and the sport, lifestyle, and entertainment coverage that define the Sunday newspaper format.

The paper is produced from the Herald and Weekly Times Tower at 40 City Road, Southbank, in Melbourne's inner south, and its journalism appears digitally through heraldsun.com.au and News Corp Australia's apps. Its politics are centre-right, in keeping with the Herald Sun tradition, and its voice is populist and unapologetically Melburnian — a paper that speaks to the suburbs as much as to the city.

History

The Sunday Herald Sun's lineage runs through two of the most famous names in Australian newspaper history. The Herald Sun itself was created on 8 October 1990 from the merger of The Sun News-Pictorial, the morning tabloid founded in 1922, and The Herald, the afternoon broadsheet founded in 1840 as the Port Phillip Herald. Both papers were owned by The Herald and Weekly Times Limited, which Rupert Murdoch's News Limited had acquired in 1987. The merged paper was first published as the Herald-Sun; the hyphen was dropped on 1 May 1993.

The Sunday edition inherited the traditions of both parents. The Sun News-Pictorial had been Melbourne's great pictorial Sunday-adjacent paper — a morning tabloid built on photographs, sport, and mass appeal — while The Herald brought 150 years of broadsheet authority. The combination gave the Sunday Herald Sun an unmatched position in the Victorian market: a Sunday paper with the reporting muscle of a merged newsroom and the popular touch of the Sun.

The Herald and Weekly Times, the publishing company behind the paper, is itself a storied institution. Its newspaper interests date to 1840 and the launch of the Port Phillip Herald. Along the way it built a media empire that included Melbourne radio station 3DB (owned from 1929 to 1987), a controlling stake in Adelaide's Advertiser, ownership of The West Australian (1969–1987), and The Weekly Times, the rural paper it still publishes. News Limited's 1987 takeover of HWT was one of the defining media transactions of the decade, and it placed the Melbourne titles — daily and Sunday — permanently within the Murdoch stable.

The Sunday Herald Sun has been published continuously as the Sunday edition of the merged paper since 1990. In 2017, the Herald Sun titles recorded a Monday-to-Friday circulation of 350,000, with the Sunday edition historically selling more — Sunday papers have long been the biggest-selling editions of the week in Australia, and the Sunday Herald Sun has regularly claimed the title of the country's highest-circulation Sunday newspaper.

Content and Sections

The Sunday Herald Sun is built for the weekend reader who wants everything in one package. The news section leads with the biggest Victorian stories of the weekend — state politics, crime and courts, and the investigations the paper is known for — alongside national and international coverage drawn from the News Corp Australia network, which shares reporting across the company's capital-city mastheads.

Sport is the paper's beating heart. Melbourne is the sporting capital of Australia, and the Sunday Herald Sun covers it accordingly: Australian rules football above all, with the AFL season turning the sports lift-out into essential reading; cricket in summer; racing, in a city that stops for the Melbourne Cup; and soccer, rugby league, and netball. The paper's sports pages combine match coverage with columnists, tipping, and the behind-the-scenes stories that fuel a week's worth of football conversation.

The features offering is broad: the Sunday magazine with long-form journalism and celebrity profiles, lifestyle sections covering food, travel, and home, motoring, real estate, and television guides. Opinion is a prominent part of the mix — the paper's columnists are among the most-read in the country, and its editorial stance is forthrightly centre-right, supportive of the Liberal–National Coalition federally and the Victorian Liberal and National parties at state level. Campaigning journalism is a house specialty: the Sunday Herald Sun has a long history of running public campaigns on issues from law and order to the cost of living.

Coverage and Audience

The Sunday Herald Sun's primary market is metropolitan Melbourne and regional Victoria, but its distribution extends well beyond the state border: the paper is available for purchase in Tasmania, the Australian Capital Territory, and the border regions of South Australia and southern New South Wales, including the Riverina and the South Coast. Digitally, its reach is national through the Herald Sun website and apps.

The audience is the great mass-market Sunday readership — families, tradies, professionals, and retirees across Melbourne's suburbs and Victoria's regions. The paper's populist voice is a deliberate editorial choice for holding that broad coalition together in a market where the alternative Sunday offering, Nine's Sunday Age, pitches to a smaller, more upmarket demographic. At its peak, the Herald Sun titles were read by some 1.5 million people, and the Sunday edition has long been the single biggest-selling newspaper edition in the country on its day.

The paper's journalism is intensely Victorian: state politics in the country's most politically volatile state capital, the courts, the property market, and the suburban issues — transport, schools, hospitals, crime — that decide elections. National stories are given the Melbourne treatment, and the paper's campaigns have repeatedly forced issues onto the state and federal agendas.

Ownership

The Sunday Herald Sun is owned by News Corp Australia and published by The Herald and Weekly Times Pty Ltd of Melbourne. News Corp Australia is the Australian arm of the global News Corp group founded by Rupert Murdoch, and the country's largest newspaper publisher, owning the metropolitan dailies and Sunday titles in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Hobart, and Darwin, as well as The Australian nationally.

The Herald and Weekly Times name carries the weight of nearly two centuries of Melbourne publishing. Founded on the Port Phillip Herald of 1840, HWT grew into one of Australia's great newspaper companies before its 1987 acquisition by News Limited. Within the News Corp empire, the Melbourne operation — daily Herald Sun, Sunday Herald Sun, and The Weekly Times — remains one of the group's most important assets, headquartered in the purpose-built Herald and Weekly Times Tower at Southbank.

Editorial leadership of the Melbourne newsroom has in recent years included editors such as Sam Weir and Phil Gardner at the daily titles, with the Sunday edition drawing on the same reporting staff and the News Corp network's interstate and international resources.

Digital Presence

The Sunday Herald Sun publishes digitally through heraldsun.com.au, the Melbourne newsroom's website within the News Corp Australia network, and through the group's mobile apps. Sunday journalism goes live throughout the weekend, and the site carries news, sport, photo galleries, and video behind the metered paywall used across News Corp's Australian mastheads. The paper is promoted through the Herald Sun's social media accounts on Facebook, X, and Instagram, where its front pages, exclusives, and sports coverage reach a large national following.

The title's content is also distributed through Apple News and Google News, and historical editions are preserved in the National Library of Australia's Trove newspaper archive and the State Library of Victoria's collections. For advertisers, the Sunday Herald Sun remains one of the most powerful print vehicles in Australian media — the single biggest Sunday audience in the country, sold in combination with the weekday Herald Sun and the group's Victorian regional and community titles.