This was part of the reason for the resignation of Sunday Telegraph editor Patience Wheatcroft, who felt excessively pressured to have her staffers converge towards the daily’s operations and web-first publishing.

“At first glance, having a separate team to cover only one day a week, on which there is little news to report – sport excepted – seems rather curious. Instead, today’s pressure is working out how much news to release online, in real time,” reports the Times.

A newspaper can have its daily and Sunday operations merged without cannibalizing the Sunday edition, the finest example being The New York Times. Sunday writers can produce online commentary during the week, while holding on to the bulk of their exclusive news for weekends.

At a time when newspapers struggle to manage their resources more effectively, it seems to only make sense to combine the teams from the daily and Sunday editions. According to the London times, “only history” gives Sunday titles their degree of independence.

There are also reasons not to change Sunday papers’ current independence. Weekend readers generally expect “a more considered product that can bring exclusives ranging from David Beckham’s love life to a leak of Cabinet documents,” reports the Times.

Commercially, Sunday (and Saturday) editions tend to be the best-selling papers of the week. Furthermore, web traffic tends to drop during week-ends (Sunday July 8 traffic at telegraph.co.uk was slightly above 315,000 visitors, compared to a half million weekday average, similar figures for the Daily Mail’s website).

“It is the profitability of a Sunday title that will largely determine how far it gets integrated into the rest of the operation,” notes the Times. So as long as Sunday editions continue to yield good results, their operations are likely to remain independent – especially considering that the Sunday papers are keeping daily editions afloat in many cases.

But “it makes more sense for new investment to chase growth online. History is not enough to justify the status quo. Part-integration is probably inevitable,” concludes the Times.

Source: Times of London through IFRA Executive News Service