Sunday Herald - The Walker Years

The Walker Years

Walker took the Sunday Herald tabloid in November 2005 which brought a temporary uplift in circulation. Sales settled at 58,000 (source: Audit Bureau of Circulations), and readership at 195,000 (source: National Readership Survey). The week before the Sunday Herald was launched in February 1999, the Barclays' Scotland on Sunday sold more than 130,000 copies. This has since plummeted to c.46,000, about 50% higher than the circulation (June 2012 ABCs) of the Sunday Herald (26,074 weekly).

Walker was behind the launch of the blog site Sundayheraldtalk.com in September 2006. Soon afterwards relations between management and staff deteriorated and trade union the National Union of Journalists threatened strike action over a change to the timing of pay days, though this never materialised. The union was again enraged in April 2007 when the Sunday Herald's US owners declared they were looking for annual cost cuts of £3 million across the three papers in their Scottish stable. This was to be achieved through redundancies, the closure of sections (such as Sunday Herald magazine) and perhaps also merging The Herald and Sunday Herald into a seven-day publishing operation. The NUJ accused Tim Blott, managing director of Newsquest Herald & Times, of reneging on pledges over the maintenance editorial standards made to the Department of Trade & Industry at the time it purchased the newspapers in 2003.