The Sunday Tribune

Sunday Tribune

Sunday Tribune Masthead, 2000s
Type	Sunday newspaper
Format	originally tabloid, later broadsheet
Owner(s)	Tribune Newspapers PLC
Editor	Nóirín Hegarty
Founded	1980, closed 1982. Relaunched 1983, closed 2011.
Political alignment	Centre/Liberal
Headquarters	27-32 Talbot Street, Dublin 1
Circulation	65,717 (as of Jan–June 2008)
Readership	177,000 (5% of market)
Website	Former: www.tribune.ie

The Sunday Tribune was an Irish Sunday broadsheet newspaper published by Tribune Newspapers plc. It was edited in its final years by Nóirín Hegarty, who changed both the tone and the physical format of the newspaper from broadsheet to tabloid. Previous editors were Conor Brady, Vincent Browne, Peter Murtagh, Matt Cooper and Paddy Murray. The Sunday Tribune was founded in 1980, closed in 1982, relaunched in 1983 and entered receivership in February 2011 after which it ceased to trade.

The newspaper was founded in 1980 by John Mulcahy as a tabloid with Conor Brady (later editor of The Irish Times) as its first editor. Format changed to broadsheet with addition of colour supplement magazine after first year. It was moderately successful but its growing financial stability (it had not yet made a profit but was moving in that direction) was undermined when its then owner, Hugh McLaughlin, launched the financially misjudged downmarket tabloid Daily News in 1982. The News proved to be a publishing disaster, with poor quality printing, bad distribution, and misjudged content, and pulled its sister paper, the Tribune, down with it within weeks. The Tribune went into receivership. The title was bought by Vincent Browne, who relaunched it in 1983 and became its editor.

The paper became one of Ireland's most successful newspapers in the 1980s, eating into the market of The Sunday Press, which like other Press titles was hæmorrhaging readers through underfunding, an aging market and poor management decisions. Replicating McLoughlin's mistake of a decade earlier, against advice Browne launched a new sister paper, the Dublin Tribune, which collapsed pulling the Sunday Tribune down with it.