Following Thursday’s announcement that the News of the World will be published for the last time tomorrow, it’s very likely that News International’s plans for making The Sun a 7-days-a-week operation are going to start moving along a little faster.
As a title, “The Sunday Sun” is already taken by a local North East paper, so the likely alternative is “The Sun on Sunday”. As such, it would appear that News International has already begun the process of securing itself a website for the new publication.
According to The Register, News International owns “sunday.co.uk“, a domain which they bought in 1997 before the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act came into force. Currently, “sunday.co.uk” redirects to an error page on the News of the World’s website.
A number of new sources have recently reported that the domain “thesunonsunday.co.uk” was purchased by an unknown company this week.
However, as I noticed last night, the registered owner of the domain has now been changed to News International, with the registrant’s address listed as being that of News International’s Wapping headquarters:
This is perhaps the latest and clearest sign that Murdoch’s decision to close the News of the World was far from a last-ditch effort to recover from the phone hacking scandal, but merely a convenient way of moving their existing plans for introducing a 7-day-a-week Sun forward.
Watch this space…
Interestingly, the News Of The World magazine that accompanied the paper used to be called Sunday…..
This was mentioned the other day on channel 4 news. Bought from the ’123′ domain website. I honestly still can’t get my head around the fact that the news of the world was the biggest selling paper….
I did notice myself, wondered if it was cybersquatters speculating or a front company.
The unknown company could have been cybersquatters who have now made their buck quicker than expected.