Sunday Times deputy editor today revealed his frustration Martin Ivens that Nat Rothschild wrote to The Times to express his anger of about the Sunday title’s coverage of the “yachtgate” shennanigans – thus giving them the scoop of the financier denouncing his former friend George Osbourne.
“Witherow and I meet to discuss developments and lament: ‘Why couldn’t the rich young devil have written to complain to us – it’s our newspaper that did it to him.’ Far from being in league with the Times in these matters, we’d rather chew our right arm off than voluntarily give our sister paper (or any paper) a scoop.”
He highlights the fact that The Times and Sunday Times are now unique among their rivals in having completely seperate editorial teams.
Both the Guardian/Observer and the Telegraph/Sunday Telegraph have all but completely merged their editorial teams.
Previously, they would have been just has competitive as the News International stablemates still are.
While the merged teams undoubtedly have benefits in terms of creating a combined online news operation – it seems inevitable that the print Sunday editions will be poorer as a result of the mergers.
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