One question: Do readers really want more of the same on Sunday?
Sunday newspapers are different . Come Sunday, readers have for years looked for a different diet on Sunday from their weekday fare. Ham and eggs rather than corn flakes .
The Sun: now on Sunday,too
So Rupert Murdoch's experiment of creating a seven-day Sun, with slightly less of the same (no Page 3 girl ), may be riskier than it seems.
Will readers who buy the weekday title automatically go for the extra edition on Sunday? Will people who never bought the Sun on a daily basis even think of it on Sunday?
In 1950, years before Murdoch, the News of the World, packing acres of seedy divorce cases into its drab grey columns, sold an astonishing 8.4 million . The People, sister to the 1.5 million selling Daily Herald, got to sales of almost 5.6 million in the 60s.
In Scotland the Sunday Post was also very different from the dailies, more of a family paper than any other in the land, crashing its way into the Guinness book of Records as the paper the biggest penetration in its market in the world - 97 per cent of the population and over 1,700,000 in sales.
Was it the difference from the daily offering that made those papers so successful ?
One paper which looked more like its sister than any other was the Sunday Express. But although it briefly got to 4 million in the early 60s it was usually well behind the Daily Express.
No doubt the Murdoch journalistic team will have some extra zap up their sleeves to give the Sunday edition that extra push. And price discounting may well disguise the actual result for some time yet.
But's it's not beyond possibility that Sunday journalists, in the trenches in this circulation battle with the Sun, may finish up shouting, "Three cheers for the difference."