Sister papers are doing it for themselves

Both the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret died on a Saturday. It meant that the daily papers were faced with the problem of avoiding duplication with the Sundays. It was a problem they chose to ignore, says David Lister

It may one day be a Trivial Pursuit question: if so, it is one that every newspaper editor will be able to answer. On which day of the week did both the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret die? The fact that both died on a Saturday posed newspapers a problem that they did not seem to anticipate, despite all the much remarked upon years of planning for the Queen Mother's death. What do you do as a daily paper to make yourself look different from the Sundays?

The answer seems to be "very little". Royal deaths are clearly not meant to occur on a Saturday. The Queen Mother's was announced right on first-edition time for the Sundays, and some had to hold the presses. But that difficulty was outweighed by the fact that at least the Sundays were first with the news, or rather (since most people will have learned about it from television or radio) first with the special tribute supplements.

So what is a daily to do? It can look different on the news front, updating the coverage, looking ahead at the events of the coming days and philosophising on the state of Britain and its attitude towards the monarchy. The dailies also have a day to judge the size of the crowds outside the Queen Mother's various homes, and the mood of the country – all luxuries of time denied to the Sundays on that frenetic Saturday night.

But what about those lovingly produced tribute supplements? Most of the Sunday papers put out their own. The dailies can hardly assume that readers didn't see them, as in most cases they belonged to sister papers, and readers are assumed to share group loyalties.

With that in mind, it is clearly not a credible or corporate stance to say that most people would have watched the news breaking on television over the weekend and not bothered with the Sunday papers and their lavish supplements. So how does one account for the massive amount of virtual duplication that went on? The Blitz, the abdication, horse racing – there may have been different bylines, but the same elements appeared in both the Sunday and Monday supplements.

Apart from the fact that it was less than half the size, the Daily Mail's "unique" 24-page tribute supplement was really not so very different from the Mail on Sunday's 52-page tribute supplement 24 hours earlier. It will be a while before we learn whether the circulation figures justify it. The Mail clearly thinks the figures will be favourable. Today it is bringing out yet another supplement, a picture souvenir, though the weekend and yesterday's papers were not exactly light on pictures.

It is not just Associated that expects its readers to collect supplements on successive days. Both The Sunday Times and The Times had 12-page pull-out tributes. The Sunday Telegraph had an eight-page tribute; The Daily Telegraph had 16 pages, though most of those pages consisted of lists of significant dates surrounded by pictures. The Mirror was not to be cowed by the Sunday Mirror's 96-page supplement. It came up with a 40-page pull-out of its own.

It can be argued that it is the job of a newspaper to be a journal of record for such an event, and that duty can be seen as extending to producing a tribute supplement. But it is more likely that editors have an eye on those circulation figures, and believe that one habit has not changed over the years: the wish of readers to have and keep commemorative supplements.

And Fleet Street decided to have faith that reader loyalty would ensure that no supplement would be as valuable to them as that produced by their daily paper. So the answer was simply to ignore the fact that readers had as much information as they needed from the Sundays, as much history, as many archive black-and-white pictures, as eclectic a range of columnists and royal watchers as one could wish for. Indeed, some of those royal watchers were pressed into service on both days. Sir Roy Strong's impressive moustache bristled in both The Sunday Times and the Daily Mail.

Readers may have had it all once; they may have even had it from a sister paper; but they could jolly well have it all again. These royal death special supplements are expensive and time-consuming to produce. Throwing them away was not going to be an option. Sisterhood be damned.