The Sun News-Pictorial

The Sun News-Pictorial, also known as The Sun, was a morning daily tabloid newspaper published in Melbourne, Australia, from 1922 until its merger in 1990 with The Herald to form the Herald-Sun.

The Sun News-Pictorial was part of The Herald and Weekly Times stable of Melbourne newspapers. For more than fifty years it was the newspaper with the largest circulation in Australia.

Along with its extensive coverage of Australian Rules football (for example, it was responsible for the competition that produced the original VFL/AFL team songs) The Sun News-Pictorial distinguished itself with its photography, columns and cartoons. Its longest running column was A Place in the Sun, originally written by Keith Dunstan—founder of the Anti-Football League—and later Graeme "Jacko" Johnstone. The award-winning cartoonist Geoff "Jeff" Hook became the full-time cartoonist for The Sun in 1964.

Keith Murdoch became editor-in-chief of The Herald in January 1921. When the proprietor of the Sydney Sun tried to break into the Melbourne market in 1922 with the launch of The Evening Sun and The Sun News-Pictorial, Murdoch fought a long campaign which eventually resulted in The Herald and Weekly Times, with the circulation of The Herald up by 50%, taking over the two tabloids in 1925. Murdoch closed the afternoon rival The Evening Sun. In 1928, Murdoch became managing director of the HWT, by which time The Sun News-Pictorial was on its way to becoming Australia's highest-selling newspaper.

An early editor, who has been given much of the credit for the paper's success, was (later Sir) Lloyd Dumas.

The Sun News-Pictorial's main competitors were the broadsheets, The Argus and The Age. The Argus was a morning daily newspaper in Melbourne that had been published since 1846 and was considered to be the general Australian newspaper of record for this period. Widely known as a conservative newspaper for most of its history, it adopted a left leaning approach from 1949, but which was closed in 1957.

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