Stephen Glover

You read it here first: the Daily Mirror will be sold within six months

You read it here first: the Daily Mirror will be sold within six months

Is the Daily Mirror for sale? It is, according to a well-placed City source. He says it is being offered around to ‘the buy-out boys’. My instinct is that he is right, and that Trinity Mirror wants to offload its troubled national daily, as well as its other national titles.

Until 1999 Trinity Mirror was Trinity, a strong group publishing profitable regional titles. Then it made what has turned out to be the serious mistake of buying Mirror Group Newspapers. For although Trinity had plenty of experience with regionals such as the Birmingham Post and the Liverpool Echo, it knew little or nothing about the very different business of publishing red-top national newspapers. In Sir Victor Blank it acquired a chairman who, though he had been a successful merchant banker, was ignorant of the newspaper business. This might not have mattered had not the company’s long-term chief executive, Philip Graf, been equally at sea in the world of national newspapers. The consequence was that both men found themselves relying on Piers Morgan, the Daily Mirror’s editor, more than was strictly prudent.

Matters came to a head in March when the Daily Mirror relaunched itself as a more upmarket title with a £20 million promotional budget. The paper’s 1950s heyday under the direction of Hugh Cudlipp was giddily invoked. But although the move was cheered by some observers, it found little favour with the punters. Despite a reduced cover price, the paper lost sales even more quickly than it had previously. Circulation is now down by 5 per cent over the year. When last month Mr Graf announced that he intended to leave the paper next year, it was generally assumed that his scalp had been taken. Matters turned to farce when a new finance director was hired and then fired before he had even joined the company.

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