Suppose some millionaire dragon — let’s call him George — came to your den with a strange request, and a weirder ambition. Suppose George, having sacks of cash spare, wanted to become a press baron, to found his own newspaper, to get instant tables at the Ivy, to enjoy tea and biscuits with Gordon Brown. Suppose he asked your advice on start-ups, niches and the chances of glory. What on earth would you say (except “Don’t!”)?

The niches, of course, are easily found, because Britain’s shrinking press market is full of gaps. There’s London, a capital city the size of Austria without even one morning paper to cover its affairs in depth (not even an American-style metro section to put city life in constant focus). There’s a stultified, shrinking tabloid market waiting for new layout ideas (modelled on Fakt in Warsaw, for instance) and a dramatically revised approach to the language it uses. (What is a nation of immigrants supposed to make of sub-editing headline jargon frozen in a time when Benny Hill stalked the earth?) There’s a clear opportunity to invent a British business paper that doesn’t have to adjust its horizons somewhere between Frankfurt and Wall Street. And what price a national (in the mould of Madrid’s Publico) that believes half the price others charge is quite enough?

The market, when you analyse it, is full of potential openings for ideas that work splendidly elsewhere. So our embryo Lord George Copper may find much to excite him – despite all the ritual glooming about decline. But then, like others before him, he’d get stuck about Sunday. Do you remember News on Sunday and The Sunday Correspondent? They were two bright 1980s launches that didn’t make it – and the launch of The Independent on Sunday that clobbered the Correspondent is routinely viewed as the step too far that undid all Andreas Whittam Smith’s good work. Sunday Today bit the dust years before its daily big sister, too. In short, on this reckoning, Sunday is a particular problem: and such Sabbath reading-sickness looks sure to endure when you sample some circulations past and present.

Take the Sunday Express, king of post-war middle-class castles. Forty years ago, in the spring of 1968, it was posting an ABC sales figure around 4.25 million. Make that around 685,000 today. And The People, of beloved, feisty memory? Its ballpark figure 40 years ago was 5.6 million. Today it’s 658,000 or so. Maybe the News of the World is still cock of the walk, but it too has suffered a bleak decline as 6.2 million has shrivelled to 3.2 million. There’s no doubt, on statistics like these, that Sunday might prove a wicked problem for our ambitious George. Indeed, some would argue that he’d better trying to rescue the Express or People from extinction rather than build his own paper from scratch. And yet, against most received wisdom and much drear number-crunching, there’s a quite different diagnosis to consider, one rooted in the market we have and the digital opportunities you can see arriving. Simply, let George forget about launching the Daily Diatribe. Convince him, in fact, that Sunday publication may be the place to start – and finish with a glow of satisfaction. For the figures, properly considered, tell an unexpectedly hopeful story.

The pointless combination

Some sections of the press have never had it so bad. In America, evening papers are dying and many of their British cousins will join them soon enough. The vagaries of demography and distribution, among other factors, are wiping them out. Daily red-tops aren’t faring much better than their Sunday stablemates: the Daily Mirror sold five million in 1968; now its circulation (1.48 million) is its lowest in living memory. But the story at the quality end of the market doesn’t merit quite such gloom.

Try a little exercise with Audit Bureau of Circulation records. Turn to the pages marked “National Morning Quality” papers. Forget about Scottish figures for The Herald and The Scotsman, which arrived only a few years ago on the back of Andrew Neil’s ambition. Then note the statistics for 40 years back. There were four quality nationals then, including the FT (The Independent didn’t exist, of course) and together they registered a benchmark total of some 1,850,000 a day. This spring, if you select a parallel figure, it’s more like 2.66 million for the five qualities (now including the Indie). If that’s “decline” on any reasonable historical definition, then cinema and theatre managers would bite your hand off to get it.

And observe what’s happened in the Sunday market, too. On the face of it, there’s been more of a decline here. The 1968 mark is around 3.15 million (only three titles, The Sunday Times dominating with roughly half of that total). Today, that looks closer to 2.5 million. But citing blank figures like this, without context, hides one crucial point – the truth within a truth that could have millionaire George reaching for his cheque book. Once upon a time, newspapers didn’t put much effort into Saturday. They were the runts of the weekly litter, thin going on anorexic. Critics wondered if they could survive – and some, like Saturday editions of the Evening Standard, didn’t. But then, from the start of the 1990s, editors and managers began to pour in more resources, add colour magazines, DVDs, special sections on everything under the sun – indeed the full bill of goods you’d normally expect to find in a Sunday paper. And sales took off.

The difficulty for outside assessors is knowing precisely how much of a spurt came on Saturday, because weekend sales and those through the week are counted together, not broken down for outside consumption. But reckon at least a third more than weekday sales on Saturday for those papers that try hardest. So a Guardian 380,000 through the week might turn to 620,000, a Times 550,000 might become 810,000 and a Telegraph 700,000 emerge as 1.1 million, with each of those Saturday figures bolstering daily delight when averaged out across the week. Nobody, without precise numbers to crunch, can provide a pat answer: but the likeliest conclusion from the last two decades is that Saturday expansion is the main reason why quality national dailies have put on, rather than lost, ABC-audited sale. In short, the weekends have rowed to the rescue, which is why those 40-year Sunday figures are much better than they seem (and still ahead of Monday-to-Friday daily totals).

The pattern that isn’t so easily glimpsed doesn’t feature daily stability and weekend frailty. On the contrary, most growth has been – and remains – weekend-based. Remarkably, too, the Sundays have defied the casual wisdom you heard at every cocktail party through the 1990s. “I don’t buy a Sunday paper any longer because I haven’t finished Saturday’s yet.” That sounded right over a glass of Sauvignon Blanc. It seemed logical – and dismaying for Sunday editors. But, yet again, logic has little to do with outcome.

Take a much shorter time scale – the familiar comparison of this year and last year. In March 2008, quality Sunday sales were recorded as 2.04 per cent down on March 2007: better by far than mid-market and red-top Sundays (down 4.7 per cent and 3.81 per cent respectively) and better than quality dailies, down 2.51 per cent. It’s not a dismaying result when you remember that Sundays are traditionally priced far higher than their Saturday in-house competitors: The Sunday Times at £2 against £1.40 for the Saturday Times, for instance. And what research there is still suggests an unexpected conclusion to the “I-can’t-read-them-both brigade”. Basically, the people who buy a giant Saturday paper also buy a giant Sunday one. It isn’t a question of either/or. It’s a division within society between newspaper addicts and newspaper non-readers – with the weekends as a high-water market.

Huge fluctuations

Gains and losses in this selling game are complex and interwoven. There’s no single reason or single route to salvation. But there is clear evidence that weekends – both Saturday and Sunday – are different. There are also some pretty useful signals why that’s so.

If you look around the world of serious news printed on paper these days, there’s one unavoidable phenomenon to register: The Economist, misleadingly titled, sparely presented, is selling well over 1.3 million copies around the globe (more than double its sale when New Labour took office). Some of that sales rise is in America, to be sure, but Britain has been a motor of growth as well. And if you need supplementary proof of a trend here, as elsewhere, look at magazines such as The Week and The Spectator selling at record levels inside the home market.

It’s easy, on examination, to understand why. There is real hunger out there for analysis, for a view of events that seems to make sense of them rather than merely report them. The internet – not to mention CNN, News 24 and the rest – can bring you incidents or upheavals as they happen. The daily press can hopefully add a few insights along the way as it pauses for breath. But to find out how one thing fits with another, why sub-prime America is bringing down British banks or how Kosovan crisis threatens European unity, you need interpretation of the facts, not just a recitation of them. In daily journalism, the ongoing debate is about viewspapers versus newspapers. In weekly journalism, the views have it by a mile. Sunday and Saturday are days for pausing and reading and making sense of the passing parade, as The Economist’s success clearly shows. And others too slow off the mark are catching up fast. Time magazine recently announced that it, too, would put views ahead of news in an effort to do what the internet doesn’t do: excavate cogency from the digital slurry of fact and fiction.

So now my questing Lord Copperwire begins to have a plan that makes sense. Don’t go into seven-day publication (no point in joining a vigorous, competitive crowd). Go for Sunday, perhaps with Saturday as an added extra. Print perhaps only one set of magazines and add-ons to cover the weekend. And deal with the run of the week exactly how young readers in particular are tackling it: by logging on and surfing around. Let’s call the paper he’s founding The Sunday Verdict (because a verdict on current events is what makes it tick). Let’s suppose the staff he gathers around him includes specialists in politics or international affairs or any big walk of life with an eager audience (Washington already has its specialist mix of print and screen political expertise). Let’s further suppose that the Verdict is there (in Economist mode) to fit the pieces together digitally as they fall – and that, come Sunday, it lays out the whole puzzle on paper for those with the time and inclination to think and brood. Let’s suppose you can marry the swiftness and cheapness on demand of the web with the relative permanency of print.

Then you have a total package. It’s only supposing, I know, but the statistics that buttress the perception aren’t supposition – they are market-place reality. Sunday, in that market place, is an unlikely, unregarded opportunity day, a day to gather together the strands and push forward techniques that have already withstood the passage of time far better than we think. Cue for a verdict? By George, I think we may have got it.