The Herald and Weekly Times Limited currently publish the morning tabloid daily The Herald Sun, which was created in 1990 from a merger of the company's morning tabloid paper The Sun News-Pictorial with its afternoon broadsheet paper The Herald which had been published as separate papers since 1840 (The Herald) and 1922 (The Sun News-Pictorial) respectively. The HWT also publish the rural Weekly Times which is aimed at farmers and rural businessmen.
This note covers the Melbourne-based Herald and WeeklyTimes group, the publisher and broadcaster acquired by Rupert Murdoch in 1987.
As chair of Herald and WeeklyTimes he appointed Keith Murdoch as editor of the group's flagship daily Herald in 1920 and was thereafter overshadowed by his protege.
The Herald and WeeklyTimes extended its interests - by 1935 it and chief executive Murdoch had stakes in 11 of the 65 Australian commercial radio stations - and enjoyed a good war.
In its heyday The Herald had a circulation of almost 600,000 readers but by the time of its 150th birthday in 1990, with the impact of evening television news and more people using cars as a means for transport rather than trains or trams, The Heralds circulation had fallen to just under 200,000 readers.
The Herald and WeeklyTimesLtd was faced with the choice of either closing The Herald which would mean a massive lay off of employees or merging it with its morning sister paper The Sun News-Pictorial and combining the best journalists and features from both papers in a new newspaper.
Its ferocious anti-Labor editorial tone (at the time) is said to have contributed significantly to the downfall of the Labor government of Joan Kirner in 1992, though the extent to which that is true is impossible to estimate.
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