End of an auld football song as the Pink News folds amid media wars

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Jul 28, 2002

THE Pink News is dead, killed off by Andrew Neil. So farewell to Scotland's only remaining Saturday evening results paper which has reported on the trials and tribulations of Hearts and Hibernian for nearly 100 years. The Edinburgh Evening News's Pink Edition, which incorporated the old Evening Dispatch, has been kept going despite a dwindling circulation. Its Glasgow counterpart, the Evening Times, bit the dust several years ago.

The Pink will now be folded into the earlier Saturday Evening News and will not be able to give the latest scores. This will clear the Scotsman Publication's Newhaven Road printing presses so that Neil can print even more of his business news from England in the ailing Scotland On Sunday.

But it has to be admitted the demise of the Saturday sports finals has been on the cards for many years, since television and wall-to- wall radio are able to give instant flashes of news from all the football grounds. It has been the dogged enthusiasm of most of the sports writers and production staff that has kept them going for so long. But no more. In Glasgow, the arrival on the streets of the first editions of the Sunday Mail added to the competitive pressures on the Evening Times.

It is also the end of an era for the Green Final in Aberdeen, the Evening Express's sports paper, with its famous Dons loving laddie, Wee Alicky, which was also buried on June 29, after running since the 1920s. The Sporting Post, produced in Dundee by DC Thomson, was also sent off after the Scottish Cup Final in May 2000.

The Evening Express's sports editor Jim Strachan, said: "We reckoned that 100,000 read the paper but only about 10,000 bought it because it was passed around the pubs. It's a shame to see them go because they were all part of the local sporting culture in Scotland, but that's them all gone now."

The exciting news that The Sun now enjoys a 1.7 million sales lead over the Daily Mirror led Sun editor David Yelland to proclaim that "we are now in full battle charge". He was also convinced that its 10p price tag in London would be the killer blow. "The Mirror is dying," crowed the bald one, who added that Lord Cudlipp (the revered journalist and editor who had turned it into the UK's largest- selling tabloid) had been a "great loser".

Cue an outraged Morgan at The Mirror who railed against "this quite disgusting attack". Yelland, he cried, "wouldn't have been fit to light one of Lord Cudlipp's cigars".

Media Watch wonders if Piers Morgan was being ironic or had simply forgotten about what finally killed off the "king of the tabloids". Lung cancer.