Page 3 is going bust, but boobs are still making money online

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/jan/25/sun-page-three-bare-breasts-internet-television

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April Fool’s Day arrived early this year – on 21 January to be precise, making a solemn BBC news lead item and dozens of celebrating women look a bit silly. Was Page 3 on the way out? Now you don’t see it; now you see it again. And reporters who trusted what they portentously called “Sun sources” looked sillier than most. Next time round, maybe, they could try to separate prank PR from base commercial calculation.

At base camp, breasts bared on a printed pages now have nil circulation magic. Two decades ago the Sun began the year selling 4.1m copies a day. It begins 2015 at 1.9m. (The Daily Mail was on 1.8m and is now on 1.6m, so nary a nipple makes a muckle.) Ten years ago, riding the lads’ mag wave, Nuts sold 307,000 copies a week; but it folded last April on 53,000. Its surviving competitor, Zoo, struggles on life support at 28,000, losing 21.5% circulation over the last reported year. FHM is 21.8% down. In short, the traditional boob market’s gone bust.

All power to the campaigners, then? Up to a point, as long as they don’t forget to smile. And never forget how the Co-op’s 2013 ban on lads’ mag displays helped crack Nuts, too. But the real driver here doesn’t live in New York, or even the “Baby Shard”. It’s just another internet upheaval, as usual.

Of course the girls of Page 3 never went away, even on the first morning after. Find them fast on the eponymous “official” Twitter account, with Nicole and Holly doing their basic stuff behind a subscription wall. But such pay-to-peepery may or may not prove much of an earner. Web subscriptions couldn’t save Nuts and look pathetically vestigial for Zoo. The true flight is to moving pictures, splattered across the net by the zillion and available for cash on satellite and cable channels.

Our old chum Mr Richard Desmond still has his Red Hot Rears (and other parts of the anatomy) TV channel. Our even older chum Mr Murdoch swells his fortune by carrying them, and many more, on Sky. Joke or no joke, the setting Sun seems part of times gone by, of a more innocent, homely era. And final victory on Page 3, whenever a more prudent BBC sees fit to hail it again, leaves a whole lot of pages left to turn.

V for Vendetta in Sun journalists’ trial?

Meanwhile Trevor Kavanagh, who seems to be cast as public spokesman for the past, beleaguered Sun, asks a plangent question after four more of his colleagues walk out of Kingston Crown Court in another of those lengthy Operation Elveden trials where a jury has failed to agree: “Is this value to the taxpayer or is it a vendetta?”

Answer (with a retrial crazily pending): Neither. The key words where payments to officials are concerned are “public interest”. Even lawyers wallow in this pit. You can take the high road of exposing crime and deceit – with plenty of precedents; or you can set the bar lower and include much more of simple human interest habitually hidden by an anal state. Regulators obviously take the high road, but Joe Public playing juror doesn’t seem half as sure. No vendetta, as judges and prosecutors plough expensively on. But not much clear, sensible or humane thinking amid the murk.