The Independent Group is planning a major new Sunday newspaper to take on the Sunday Times and City Press, says leading media analyist Professor Anton Harber.

And, according to the Wits Journalism School professor's blog, the first casualty could be their own Sunday Independent.

Harber notes that Sunday Times recently launched a direct challenge to the Independent’s flagship newspaper, The Star, in the form of a free-to-subscribers daily tabloid paper, the Times.

With a focus on careers, Harber says the new Times is a direct attack on the Star’s hold on the daily jobs market in Gauteng. It presents a much livelier and lighter read than the Star.

Now the Star is responding with plans to bring out the Sunday Star. It will be a tabloid and the project is being led by veteran newsman and regular AIP consultant Ray Joseph.

It would in fact be a relaunch, as the Sunday Star was a venture that failed some years back.

To take on the Sunday Times is to challenge the country’s most formidable, well-established and lucrative publishing machine. City Press is also in a strong position, having had a recent rise of circulation under editor Mathatha Tsedu and with the powerful Media 24 group behind it. Also on a Sunday, there is Rapport, the large Afrikaans paper, Sondag, the new Afrikaans tabloid, Sunday Sun and Sunday Sowetan. That does not leave much room for new products.

But in an active market in which other publishers have been aggressively launching new products, this is the first significant move by the Independent Group for some time. The Group has been cost and staff-cutting for some years, producing colossal profits for their Irish owners but re-investing little of it back here. They famously passed on the Daily Sun, allowing their competitors at Media 24 to sew up the fastest-growing market segment.

Independent executives I spoke to today were keen to say that the new product was only one of a number of projects in the planning stages. It did not have approval or even a proper budget yet, said Mike Tissong.

Joseph confirmed this, saying only that various options were being considered and no decisions had been made.

But Sunday Independent staff were recently told that they had to do something about their steady 40 000 circulation. The group was planning to launch (or relaunch) the Sunday Star, they were told, and the managers indicated the Independent would be under pressure to increase its sales.

The Sunday Independent has long been starved of resources. It has no full-time editor (Jovial Rantao spends all his time as Star deputy-editor and leaves the running of the Sunday paper to others), only two reporters and no marketing budget. It’s chances of increasing circulation without some resources to back this up are, to put it plainly, nil.

However, the Sunday Independent was the pet project of the group’s owner, Tony O’Reilly, who touted it in the early days of his investment as his contribution to quality, serious journalism. It is thought that he has too much invested politically and personally to close the Sunday Indie down in a hurry.

Nevertheless, another new newspaper would stir up an already boiling newspaper cauldron. And it would shake the Indie Group out of its complacency.