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Daily Star Sunday: a knobstick's reply

I am, it appears, a "knobstick". I'm not quite certain whether this is better or worse on the scale of insults than being a "dinosaur" - the description of Piers Morgan and Kelvin MacKenzie - but it doesn't sound too complimentary. I certainly think Piers and Kelvin will think it odd to be bracketed with me by Gareth Morgan, editor of the Daily Star Sunday.

Morgan was sounding off in a Press Gazette interview while explaining why his five-year-old paper is "kicking seven bells" out of the opposition by recording a 26.4% year-on-year rise to sell a weekly average of 533,248 copies last month. This has been achieved, he says, because he and his small team have found the right formula - showbiz, sport, sex and scandal - to attract readers.

This must be very different showbiz, sport, sex and scandal from that purveyed by rivals such as the News of the World and The People, both of which are losing readers. Morgan explains that The People has two problems - its readers are dying and it lacks a "sense of fun" - while the NoW "used to be a must-read... when they were always breaking stories."

So what does the Daily Star Sunday do? "We just try and do simple things well... It's an easy thing, journalism: you just go out and talk to people, listen to what your mates are doing... There is a misconception in wanky London media circles about us. We've had people going to Afghanistan, we've had people on the frontline. It's not cheap as chips, but there is a sense of fun."

And, of course, it has benefited from an aggressive TV marketing campaign and a string of CD give-aways, an expensive promotion funded by the paper's proprietor Richard Desmond. But Morgan wants us to understand that even before that campaign, his paper was on the up and up.

Who, then, is buying the Daily Star Sunday? Morgan says: "It's a bloke in his mid-to-late 30s, family man, in a job." They are "ordinary people" who like Big Brother, football, the X Factor, and, apparently, both 70s punk and 90s indie music.p> The paper has had a 400,000-plus audience virtually since its inception and, without the marketing spend, it will fall back to that. Mind you, I agree with Morgan about The People. It is now such a poor publication. I am writing a book chapter about popular paper investigative journalism and, by a wide margin, The People emerges with a glowing record. It broke really important stories, including three major cases police corruption.

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