The Sun News-Pictorial
Australian tabloid newspaper from 1922 to 1990
The Sun News-Pictorial (known as The Sun) was a morning daily tabloid newspaper published in Melbourne, Victoria, 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. In 1930, more than 650,000 copies were sold each day.
Character
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 Jeff Hook became the full-time cartoonist for The Sun News-Pictorial in 1964.
History
Origin
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 formation of The Herald and Weekly Times (HWT), with the circulation of The Herald up by 50%, taking over the two tabloids in 1925. Murdoch closed the afternoon rival The Evening Sun.
“The Sun News-Pictorial” enters the record as australian tabloid newspaper from 1922 to 1990. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what News-Pictorial, Australian and tabloid can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“The Sun News-Pictorial” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, News-Pictorial, Australian and tabloid provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7767350. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1922, 1990, 1930 and 1964.
Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Sun News-Pictorial” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.