Amid the furore over Rupert Murdoch possibly axing page 3, a key issue has been left unexplored. Without page 3 how can they print page 4?
I would argue that axing page 3 would rapidly lead to an abolition of both. And if our national broadsheets start skipping straight from page 2 to page 5, what kind of message does this send our children, some of whom are still learning to count?
Page 3 may have become “anachronistic” or “obvious” to Murdoch critics, but there are still some traditionalists out there who think we shouldn’t try to fix what’s not broken – let’s not forget that 2 has been followed by 3 since The Sun was founded, if not before. It’s simply the natural order of things. And as someone who has actually been 3, I for one applaud the “freshness” and “youth” that the number has come to be associated with.
The possible move has been further criticised by some as a sly bid by Murdoch to save on paper and printing ink. But many other publications have been doing the same for quite some time – The Sun, for example, has been systematically stripping all quality content from its pages for the last 20 years, and none of its readers have noticed.
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