Trinity Mirror closes ‘New Day’ after 2 months

Trinity Mirror’s New Day has not lasted long

Newspaper group Trinity Mirror announced today that New Day – the cheap daily paper it launched in late February – will close tomorrow.

The news came in a trading update to the stock market at its annual meeting:

Although The New Day has received many supportive reviews and built a strong following on Facebook, the circulation for the title is below our expectations. As a result, we have decided to close the title on 6 May 2016.

The newspaper group, which owns the Mirror and local newspapers such as the Liverpool Echo, also said the ‘trading environment for print advertising continues to be volatile’.

Under editor Alison Phillips, who formerly ran both the Sunday Mirror and Sunday People, the aim of the experiment was to achieve sales of 200,000 a day, but actual figures as low as 30,000 copies have been reported.

The Guardian columnist and City University academic Roy Greenslade immediately pointed the finger of blame at chief executive Simon Fox in  a comment piece under the headline ‘The New Day got off to a terrible start, and Trinity Mirror’s bosses are to blame‘.

Fox has no experience of running newspapers, having been chief of HMV before moving to Trinity Mirror, although he was a non-executive director at Guardian Media Group.

Sadly, New Day will now have to report its last big story – its own demise.

>>British newspapers profiled

 

Newspapers in the digital Khyber pass

Back in 2009, I wrote ‘Newspapers in a digital Khyber Pass‘ that set out the challenge for Fleet’ Street’s newspapers in moving to digital. Two weeks ago, I wrote about newspapers closing down. I get back from Cuba to find that the Lebedevs have sold off the cheapsheet daily i to Johnston Press and are about to close the print Independent, make most of the staff redundant and go online only.  So, the paper that led the magazinisation of the press is the first to cut its print base and take the jump into the digital maelstrom.

Russian KGB-man turned banker, Alexander Lebedev, and his son, Evgeny, bought up Britain’s youngest national along with London’s Evening Standard. They’ve turned the latter into a celeb-focused cheerysheet.

But what’s this? Trinity Mirror, the regional group that also owns the Daily Mirror, is about to launch a weekday newspaper called New Day. So, next week Britain’s biggest regional newspaper group will by taking on rival regional group Johnston Press and the 40p i with its 50p New Day. What is it that regional groups think they know? Is it just about cutting costs?

>>UK national papers

>>Regional newspaper groups

Ace photographer Ken Griffiths dies

Photographer Ken Griffiths at the Grand Canyon, Arizona, on a shoot for Volvo. Photograph by his assistant,  Lucy Williams-Wynn, from the Guardian website

Sad to hear at the weekend of the death of the photographer Ken Griffiths last month. As well as following his work, he was also a neighbour, living in the Surrey Dispensary until a year ago.

He was on the staff of the Sunday Times Magazine with Don McCullin in the 1970s and then did advertising for the likes of Saatchi & Saatchi as well as editorial work. Former Sunday Times editor Harold Evans used his images in Conde Nast Traveller from the first issue.

Ken had no truck with digital cameras, using whole-plate cameras, a century-old colour process called Carbro and printing on platinum that enabled him to achieve incredibly subtle images that were shown to great effect in the series he did of the Three Gorges dam in China. His father’s Welsh roots inspired several personal projects.

He was a fountain of stories, coming from that generation of edgy artists and bon-viveurs with friends such as Bruce Bernard – who chose one of Ken’s images for the V&A as one of 100 to tell the history of photography for the V&A – and Lucien Freud. He could charm the legs off a donkey, holding forth in the local pub, the Roebuck, with his tale of living on Easter Island for a week to photograph the statues and waking up each night under a blanket of cockroaches!

The last project he told me he was working on was to return to his native New Zealand and document the changing seasons – a technique he used for one of his early features, to document an elderly couple growing crops in their ‘English Country Garden’, as Phil Davison describes in his obituary of Ken in the Guardian.

See also a short Telegraph interview from 2011.

>>>WATCH OUT for my book on British Magazine Design from the V&A

Kitchener – this is not a poster!

Daily Mail’s Event magazine with its Ralph Steadman article that mistakenly identifies a poster as the original London Opinion cover

Whatever the faults of the Daily Mail, it exhibits a sense of history in the logo it carries on its ‘answers to readers questions’ page. The logo is based on the original title for the magazine that founded the Daily Mail dynasty back in 1888: Answers to Correspondents on Every Subject under the Sun, founded by Alfred Harmsworth.

Logo from the present-day Daily Mail – based on a magazine title from the 1880s

As Answers, this became a massive success, building on the pioneering George Newnes’s Tit-Bits, for which Harmsworth had worked, to help establish British magazines as the first truly mass media. Answers claimed to answer questions sent in by readers directly by post, and those of general interest were published. Answers was a such a success that it was the foundation of a magazine and newspaper empire, the likes of which the world had never seen. Alfred and his brother Harold went on to found both the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror, then buy up both the Sunday Observer and the Times and become lords Northcliffe and Rothermere. Alongside the newspapers, the Harmsworth’s Amalgamated Press (later Fleetway) became the largest periodical publishing empire in the world. Viscount Rothermere rules the roost at today’s descendant, the Daily Mail & General Trust.

The original magazine cover – this is NOT a poster!

So it’s no surprise that the paper is running a series to mark World War One, including an 80-page souvenir issue of its listings section, Event. Pride of place in the May 4 edition was a feature by the brilliant Ralph Steadman, whose father fought in that war and was injured three times. Steadman interprets Alfred Leete’s famous Kitchener image and the article make reference  to its original appearance as a London Opinion cover – but then shows one of the early London Opinion posters in the centre of the spread rather than the magazine cover!

The error adds to half a century of people getting it wrong: including the Imperial War Museum (which was given the artwork by Leete); Picture Post using the artwork in 1940 and again referring to it only as a poster; and biographers such as  Philip Magnus adding to the confusion. Even the British Library captions the cover as a poster in an article by the historian Professor David Welch. To cap it all, the Royal Mint makes no reference to Leete even as it copies his artwork for a commemorative coin!

The full story of Alfred Leete’s cover illustration for London Opinion is told in the book, The Amazing Kitchener Poster.

Is the digital Daily Mail really in profit?

Media Week reports that the Daily Mail’s website has gone into profit and Roy Greenslade has run a comment. But how exactly has it happened? MW reports:

The site’s unparallelled growth in vistors over the past five years has been achieved by fewer than 30 people in the UK, a team of 20 in New York, and 10 in Los Angeles.

But 60 is far too low a headcount for be writing all that copy, which suggests only journalists working directly on the site are costed. All the content of the Daily Mail – and journalism does not come cheap – must come across for free. The website is spiced up with totty frothy stories but the paper’s content gives it the coverage to be an online force. To give an idea of the size of the operation, DMGT, the parent company, cut 105 jobs in the quarter – but still employs 3,809 people across the Mail, its Euromoney financial division and other operations.

The paper’s turnover was £435m – MailOnline is set to generate just £30m this year. It may be in profit but it is still a pimple on the print empire – and wholly dependent on it.

Industry profile: UK newspapers

Murdoch’s News of the World legacy

Rupert Murdoch on Guardian website

What will be Rupert Murdoch’s legacy in terms of newspapers in Britain? With the Sun, Times, Sunday Times and News of the World he had the most powerful newspaper group in Britain. He’s a throwback to the great twentieth century Fleet St barons – I’ve read of Northcliffe describing the young Murdoch as his favourite newspaperman.

He fought off Robert Maxwell to win control of News of the World and use it as the international stepping stone to form the world’s first global media group. His reputation for media innovation is unrivalled. However, today’s Machiavellian decision to close the News of the World throws a 168-year history, 200 journalists – and some legendary campaigning journalism – on the scrapheap.

Yet, even though Murdoch has acted with unprecedented speed to try to halt the damage, more is undoubtedly still to come. The fallout – a Rupertgate or Jamesgate – could leave the Murdoch name lying alongside those of Maxwell and a corrupt media mogul of the early 1900s, Horatio Bottomley.

Britain’s most famous front page – the Sun’s Gotcha

But Rupert brought us the topless redtop style of the Sun with its Page 3, along with Kelvin MacKenzie, and headlines such as ‘Gotcha’ and ‘Freddie Starr: I ate my hamster’ – as well as the later ‘Freddie Starr: I ‘ate my wife’ . And England team manager Graham Taylor as a turnip. How many other front or back pages are as well known? But that paper also plumbed the depths with its Hillsborough coverage – an example of falling in with the police – and is still paying the price in terms of its sales on Merseyside.

Murdoch took over the Times (on a Friday, the 13^th), and took it downmarket, shafting Harry Evans in the process, though he has bankrolled it to the tune of tens of millions a year for a while now.

His papers helped to turn round the fortunes of Margaret Thatcher when she was unpopular in her first years in power. The Sunday Times was hagiographic here, portraying her on the front of its magazine as Joan of Arc. Murdoch’s HarperCollins book arm later published Thatcher’s memoirs. And the Sun is seen as having saved John Major from electoral defeat in 1992 with its vitriolic campaign against Neil Kinnock – ‘If Kinnock wins today, will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights’ ran the front page on polling day.

Andrew Neil, looking on BBC TV these days as if his whole body is on botox, was working for Murdoch when he bought us never-mind-the-quality-feel-the-width journalism at the Sunday Times and adverts to recruit reporters who could write at length on any topic. That has certainly done journalism no good. As Matthew Engel writes in the British Journalism Review, ‘Over the past ten years the quantity has remained relatively stable,’ but ‘what worries me now is the quality.’ He was writing about newspaper sports pages in general, but it’s an argument that can be made for the rest of the Sunday Times.

Mirabelle launch cover

Murdoch failed to make much headway in magazines (remember the embarrassing Mirabelle?), but brought us Sky TV and the Simpsons – though ruined the game of football in the process.

He is also one of the world’s most successful tax avoiders, managing to make billions in profits but using complex offshore company structures to avoid paying tax.

But the activities at the News of the World take us back to Hillsborough in terms of awfulness. For the editor and executives to say they did not know what was going on is no defence. They should have known. The paper was, as Rosie Boycott said on Newsnight, ‘200 miles into illegality’.  To be paying £100K to private eye Glen Mulcaire and not know what he was doing just beggars belief.  Phone-hacking comes under the RIPA Act – Regulation of Investigatory Powers 2000.  It’s what was used to jail News of the World royal editor Clive Goodman and Mulcaire.

Boards of directors are paid to be responsible and ignorance is no defence under the law. It’s difficult to see Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson going quietly. Bigger fish than Mulcaire and Goodman are going to come into the frame.

WikiLeaks and newspaper censorship

‘[T]here has been a lot of ill-informed comment (and sometimes downright lies) about the role of the Defence, Press and Broadcasting Advisory Committee and the DA notice system which it regulates. Cries of censorship abound.’

So writes Simon Bucks of Sky, and vice-chair of the Defence, Press and Broadcasting Advisory Committee, which issues DA notices to the media – commonly referred to as the D notice committee. The WikiLeaks story about the US diplomatic cables has kicked it all off. Guido Fawkes and WikiLeaks itself are cited as misrepresenting the system.

Bucks then goes on to cut through the garbage with a lucid explanation of what the committee does and how the D notice system works. Required reading if you blog on the topic.