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The company registered the magazine title Spectrum with the Patent Office in October and Times insiders have indicated that the news analysis magazine genre would be an area of interest.

News Magazines, the group's magazine division established at the end of 2005, is currently researching the project with the target audience through focus groups, according to industry sources.

News analysis is the most likely route for the new magazine. The publisher is understood to want to build on the established "pillars" of News International's papers to complement established spin-offs such as home interest magazine The Sunday Times Inside Out and Sunday Times Travel - the latter currently published under licence by River Publishing.

As with News Magazines' other projects, including a proposed women's weekly originally expected for launch towards the end of 2006, the title is unlikely to be launched ahead of the Sky customer magazine, which the company won from contract publisher John Brown and will publish from this summer.

A proposed Sunday Times-branded motoring title is unlikely to see the light of day due to star columnist Jeremy Clarkson's involvement with BBC Top Gear magazine.

Camilla Rhodes, chief executive of News Magazines, declined to comment on the specific project. "We're looking at a whole range of different projects; some are at desk stage, others are fully fledged ideas," she said.

The proposed new title would compete for readers with BBC Magazines' planned news weekly, developed under the codename Project Phoenix and tipped to be called Newsbrief. The BBC is believed to be launching the magazine in April.

News weeklies are a growing market, led by The Economist, which sells 162,112 copies in the UK. Dennis Publishing's news digest The Week increased sales by 13.9% year on year to 120,777 in the January to June 2006 ABCs, while The Spectator's sales were up by 4.4% to 70,090.

However, news-stand sales account for less than a third of the circulation of news weeklies, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

Paul Thomas, investment director at MindShare, said: "More and more people realise that what happens in politics and business affects them personally. These publications are no longer seen as elitist."