Bombs away, sex is back

It's all very well for Piers Morgan to bang on about the importance of serious journalism - The Mirror has done a sterling job since 11 September - but not all national newspaper editors share his appetite for running page after page of reports from the war zone. When it comes to the Sunday red-tops, the signs are that it's sex and showbiz rather than anthrax and the endurance of the Taliban that sell papers.

Three weeks ago, sales of the News of the World were perilously close to falling below four million. The bombing of Kabul was under way but there was no sign of Osama bin Laden, only doom and gloom, about which people had been reading all week. It was time to go on the offensive by bringing forward the paper's "50 sexiest women in the world" supplement - and, bingo, circulation rose by nearly 100,000, albeit with the help of sustained TV advertising on Saturday.

Last Sunday, the NoW promoted its Harry Potter magazine on TV and splashed on Michael Barrymore's television "confession" to Martin Bashir. There was no front-page mention of the war and circulation is estimated to have been boosted by another 20,000.

It was a similar but less spectacular scenario at the Sunday People, where for the first time since the World Trade Center disaster there was no direct reference on the front to the hostilities. Instead, the paper led on a story about the "gangster secret" of an EastEnders actress - and sales went up by an estimated 15,000.

Meanwhile, its sister paper the Sunday Mirror went with "We'll Smoke Him Out" - a reference to British commandos' pursuit of Bin Laden - and dropped by 35,000.

"I feel uncomfortable splashing on a major showbiz story when we're in the middle of a war," says Tina Weaver, editor of the Sunday Mirror, who has made a point of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with her editor-in-chief, Morgan, in extensive coverage of the bombing of Afghanistan. "It's still the only story people are talking about."

Neil Wallis, editor of the Sunday People, is not so sure. "Sunday markets are different from the daily markets. The indications are that people don't want to read too much about the war on Sundays, but you can't ignore it. Without question, the war is making our lives difficult. Sunday newspapers, even more than the dailies, are all about balance and suddenly we have had imposed on us something that has dominated that balance."

Balance is a delicate issue at Trinity Mirror, whose two red-top Sundays, the People and the Sunday Mirror, compete with each other, while both competing with the News of the World. Year on year, the People is down 7.56 per cent, while the Sunday Mirror is down 2.79 per cent. One solution would be for the People and Sunday Mirror to join forces, but would this make commercial sense at a time when both titles continue to make money?

A more realistic strategy is for the papers to define and stick to their respective markets. This was Weaver's brief when she took over from Colin Myler six months ago. "There are now huge points of difference between us and the People," says Weaver. "I see us as positioned between The Mail on Sunday on one hand and the News of the World and the People on the other. We don't do hard, inyour-face sex but we've broken some big stories, such as getting the only interview with Bin Laden's son."

But last Sunday both the People and the Sunday Mirror devoted pages two and three to the tangled romance of the same EastEnders actress, and both produced Harry Potter supplements as spoilers to the News of the World. Admittedly, the Sunday Mirror had two pages more on the war than the People but it was the similarities rather than the differences between the two titles that were most striking.

Wallis, a former deputy editor of The Sun, has been starved of any form of promotional or advertising budget, while the News of the World has been able to spend itself out of trouble. The temptation for the People to adopt the strategy of the ebullient Daily Star and downgrade serious news in favour of tittle-tattle is one that will confront Wallis more and more as the war continues.

No wonder the News of the World's managing editor, Stuart Kuttner, is crowing. "We've just seen the highest gap between us and the combined sales of our so-called rivals. I wouldn't attribute that to a conscious decision to downgrade the war. Events in Afghanistan and Pakistan remain a high priority but that doesn't mean they have to be on Page one."