The Sun on Sunday issue 2: digested

Since last week’s post on the Sun on Sunday proved quite popular I thought I’d take a look at this week’s issue.

One of the most surprising things from last week’s issue was the topless picture of Kelly Rowland page 3 since the Sun on Sunday was meant to have lost this regular in an attempt at a family-friendly rebrand. Yesterday’s issue had a smutty picture of Welsh opera singer Katherine Jenkins on page 3 suggesting that the famous leaf will feature a toned-down glamour shot on a regular basis.

There was also a great new badge to maintain last week’s Brass Eye vibe.

I found a copy of Friday’s Sun and thought I’d take a look to see whether there’s much difference with the Sunday edition. I was rewarded with a couple more brilliant badges, this first one is to mark the Sun’s new campaign against ‘Elf and Safety. I think it pips ‘Must try harder to kick out Qatada’ as my favourite badge yet.

I noticed some very bizarre photoshopping throughout the issue including:

Ed Miliband as C3PO

RVP and AVB as a superhero and a supervillain

Alan Shearer reading a copy of the Sun which I’d wager wasn’t there when the photo was taken

The Arch Bishop of York Dr John Sentamu has been given a regular column. I find the combination of a prominent and serious religious figure with slightly crass Sun-pun headlines very odd.

There are some new emoticons to accompany the weird and wonderful stories around the world which weren’t used in last week’s issue. I’m not entirely sure what emotion the second one if meant to display.

There’s an interview with Mike Tyson in sport. It celebrates his return from being convicted of rape, serving time for drug offences and assaulting two motorists, and bankruptcy to trying to do something good for the homeless. Surely a noble deed. However, on pages 6 and 10 the Sun blasts the government for spending an alleged £5m a year on housing previous convicts including, rapists and robbers. This cost is due to the fact that it is difficult to find people willing to share accommodation with criminals with previous convictions and therefore the government is supposedly paying for the extra rooms in multi-bedroom flats to lie empty. While these articles aren’t directly related, it feels hypocritical to be so negative about the cost of rehousing those with previous convictions who may, like Tyson, be looking for a fresh start yet be so positive about Tyson who has a fairly comprehensive criminal record himself.

Katie Price tackles benefit fraud in her column (taking the total number of benefit-fraud articles between pages 6 and 13 up to three which, bearing in mind that one and two halves of the pages are taken up by adverts, isn’t bad going). I still feeling that attacking Katie Price on the Internet is ill-advised and far too easy but with every closed-minded and ill-informed column I read by her I edge closer to breaking this rule.

As a final thought, I’ve found reading the Sun on Sunday very disorientating, many pages are littered with unorganised NIBs, some less that 15 words long, which are completely unrelated to the main body of the page. That said, if you have a readership which isn’t looking for a series of long articles then this makes sense as a way to fill slightly disjointed pages.