Trinity Mirror has confirmed that its new national print title The New Day will hit the newsstands a week today.
The first standalone national daily newspaper for 30 years, The New Day will be available from Monday 29 February across the UK.
Its launch editor will be Sunday Mirror editor Alison Phillips and TM is billing the new 40-page title as “visually-striking, upbeat, optimistic and politically neutral.”
And in a bold declaration of the company’s faith in print, Alison said that declining newspaper sales were not down to people having fallen out of love with them, merely that existing titles were not meeting their needs.
She said: “There are many people who aren’t currently buying a newspaper, not because they have fallen out of love with newspapers as a format, but because what is currently available on the newsstand is not meeting their needs.
“This paper has been created as a result of customer insight and is the first newspaper designed for people’s modern lifestyles.”
Trinity Mirror chief executive Simon Fox said: “Over a million people have stopped buying a newspaper in the past two years but we believe a large number of them can be tempted back with the right product.
“Revitalising print is a core part of our strategy in parallel with digital transformation and there doesn’t have to be a choice between the two – newspapers can live in the digital age if they have been designed to offer something different.”
In an interview with BBC Radio 4, Simon added: “Many readers are giving up on print, but we don’t think it has to be like that … Print has been in long-term decline because lack of innovation.”
Simon also said the launch “had nothing to do with” Johnston Press’s purchase of the i newspaper and the subsequent closure of The Independent, saying: “You can’t dream up a new title overnight.”
The launch of The New Day will underline TM’s position as the largest national and regional newspaper publisher in the UK, following its purchase of Local World last November for £220m.
Significantly the paper will not have a companion website, although it will have a social media presence.
Trinity Mirror says the paper “will cover news and topical content but with a modern style and tone, aimed at a wide audience of women and men who want something different from what is currently available.
“It will report with an upbeat, optimistic approach and will be politically neutral. It will cover important stories in a balanced way, without telling the reader what to think.”
Alison will oversee a staff of 25 which will include former Oxford Mail and Derby Telegraph photographer Leah McLaren as head of images.
The paper will be available for free from over 40,000 retailers on its first day and then will trial at 25p for two weeks before retailing at 50p after that.
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Errr, yes they have.
You can’t innovate any further on paper – the outer limits of improvement have been reached. That’s it. Newsprint as a format is done!
Talk it up all you like, but this will bite Trinity Mirror on the backside before the year is out, and those who will pay the price of its failure are the poor saps like my colleagues and I in the regionals.
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Brilliant news for all working in the newspapers divisions of TM, including those recently hard-pressed folk in the Regional arms. No more job worries and perhaps even a return to fair annual salary rises and, dare I say it, bonuses for work well done that delivers returns for shareholders and senior executives. O yes.
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This sounds remarkably like the i paper to me…No rela examples of how it will be genuinely different though.
Trinity Mirror says the paper “will cover news and topical content but with a modern style and tone, aimed at a wide audience of women and men who want something different from what is currently available.
“It will report with an upbeat, optimistic approach and will be politically neutral. It will cover important stories in a balanced way, without telling the reader what to think.”
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They must now be pumping a gas into the air conditioning at TM and JP headquarters that makes people think newspapers and print is the future.
“Now go out, run don’t walk, and buy or start up a national newspaper. You want to do this, you know it is right, you feel happy, you are happy. Digital is dead, digital is dirty, you are clean. Now go out, run don’t walk, and…”
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i recon JP shares will slide. I’m betting it didn’t cost TM £24m to launch this paper.
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You have to wish the guys and gals on the ground the best of luck, but listening to her on Today I was very unconvinced by the business model. It sounds like it will be a paid for Metro – aimed at people who don’t buy newspapers carrying stories that they turn to online sources to read in bite-sized format. Huh? I wonder what the ex-Reading Post staffers who got dumped after its shift to online-only think of this.
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“You can’t dream up a new title overnight.”
True,no more than you can dream up a completely new strategy for selling something which to all intents and purposes had been pronounced DOA a few days,weeks,months back.
Do mssrs Fox and Phillips really,really believe this latest U turn on the “therory” of why people arent buying newspapers?
if so its worse than i thought
By way of a remionder,people arent buying daily or weekly newspapers because they no longer serve the purpose for whch they are meant eg; providing “news”
It also doesnt help that the quality and actual news value has dropped so far as to turn more and more people off from making this once obligatory purchase into a now,non essentail cost saving,couple this with the short term greed of increased cover charges for an inferior product and the picture looks bleak for the print medium.
and how uncomfortable must it be having to go back on all thats been said previously about the future being on line with print publications a thing of the past,please get your strategy sorted and your story together if you want anyone to take you seriously,although aftert this latest piece i thik thats highly unlikely.
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Confused: print is the new digital which was the new print which was the old digital. Not that difficult to comprehend.
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It would make a welcome change to have politically neutral paper instead of the blatantly slanted reporting we get in the Mail, Torygraph, Sun, Mirror etc which does no-one any service. God help us when the EU debate really gets going. Papers will be filled with propaganda.
Good luck to this paper.
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“And in a bold declaration of the company’s faith in print, Alison said that declining newspaper sales were not down to people having fallen out of love with them, merely that existing titles were not meeting their needs.”
And whose fault is that, may I ask? Surely not the likes of Trinity Mirror, JP et al, who are bending over backwards to supply their newspapers with the staff and resources to ensure that the public’s love affair with newspapers continues to flourish. After all, is there a more certain way to meet the needs of your audience than by increasing its price and slashing its quality?
Newspaper circulations have been declining for decades despite all the attempts to stem the flow. It may be a NewDay, but it is not a new dawn for the printed newspaper. At best it will be a palliative plaster applied to an industry that is dying as surely and as certainly as its dwindling audience.
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People did not fall out of love with papers. They were made to.
The bride was dragged screaming from the altar by someone who knew better about what was good for her. Except they didn’t.
Now papers are wrecked and digital is, relatively speaking, a dismal failure in regional publishing.
Where to next?
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How do new things ever start? Entrepreneurial people have a go at them. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t.
Not everyone wants to live in a ‘safe’ public sector-like environment that will only ever go one way, down.
This sounds like a calculated risk for a now much more stable Trinity Mirror. Good luck to the New Day!
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Paper boy: digital is not “relatively speaking” a failure in regional publishing. It’s an absolute and utter failure. Look at the other big story on HTFP today – a lauded and award-winning wholly digital local news venture collapsing after less than seven months.
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Yes, good luck to the staff, but what was the problem with improving the quality of the Daily Mirror and the The People?
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Not long now
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The demise of newspapers was largely down to corporations cutting quality and upping the price, I can’t think of any other industry that does this and expects different results. If you went to Costa Coffee and they charged you ten quid for a Nescafe you’d stop going.
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In the short term it will enable TM to cut back on its free print Metro in the NE which it produces under licence.
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I hope the New Day will not turn out to be a mere propaganda sheet in the referendum battle, disappearing after June.
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Good luck to the New Day. Just remember most people are time poor these days. If you can grab 10 mins of their time before they boot up the iPad or laptop, switch on the TV or radio or check their emails or the web on their mobile you are doing well. Punters don’t care that the media can’t make money out of the web – they just want their news up to date 24 hours a day.
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If there’s a future in newspapers I’m quite positive it doesn’t lie in charging people for what they can get for free on their phones, the only difference being that it’s stale.
Long-form quality journalism – maybe. Massive-scale free distribution – maybe. Hyperlocalism – maybe.
But I just can’t imagine *why* anybody would actually take the trouble to buy this, except a few HTFP readers interested to see what it looks like.
It’s also a terrible, terrible title – I’m not sure if it sounds more fascist or Sally Army.
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The real story here is that The New Day won’t have its own website. Digitally speaking it’s looking at social media platforms only. Going where the people are, not trying to drag them back to a horrendous ad-filled and slow website. I see Facebook/Instagram/Snapchat revenue shares and possible task-specific apps. V interesting.
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It’s a new dawn and a new day but I’m not sure TM will be feeling so good about it 12 months down the line.
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A Chance a 20p Doomed at 50p
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Same people who bemoan the death of print now bemoaning a new print venture.
Happy Monday!
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i really admire their shameless front in trying to undo the chaos caused by running down one side of the business and letting it wither on the vine whilst switching all efforts into the other to make it profitable then mid journey huddling together and coming out saying they’re going back to the original plan albeit with a greatly reduced product and a diminished audience.
People have already voted with their feet and turned their backs on local news papers and still no ones making on line sites pay as this mornings other lead story confirmed.
I’ll give it till year end or until the budgeted pot of cash put aside to prop it up runs out, whichever comes first.
Thing is where do they go then?
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TM’s mistake was the same as JP and Newsquest. They thought readers would not notice a drop in quality in depth of reporting and writing as more kids took over the reins.
I really wish this one luck but it needs to be very good and written by people with a bit of nous.
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Now, is the business model changing again? I thought it was all about reaching a total audience. No website, limited social media, it’s on the back foot from the start. News is digested so differently in the modern world that I think the brains behind this one must have been using dial up instead of high speed broadband and they have lost the signal.
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“People haven’t fallen out of love with newspapers” – says the company which axed a great swathe of its print titles in the Surrey and Thames Valley region a few months ago…
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Sounds like The London Paper all over again. The idea that there’s a million or more readers out there just waiting to be tempted back with the ‘right’ product is utter nonsense. Print’s time has come and gone, the real tragedy being how poorly the declining years have been managed by the major players in the industry.
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“It will report with an upbeat, optimistic approach and will be politically neutral. It will cover important stories in a balanced way, without telling the reader what to think.”
Never believe what readers say in focus groups. Nobody is going to admit: “I get a sick thrill reading stories about murder and rape, and I like it when papers tell me what to think because, to be honest, I’m as thick as mince and can’t be bothered to consider political issues as, thanks to my ‘busy modern lifestyle’, I spend all day posting pictures of cats on Facebook.”
That, however, is the truth for the majority of the public.
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As picked up on above, the big bit is “Significantly the paper will not have a companion website, although it will have a social media presence.”
Will the current move from print to pageviews at whatever cost be finally killed off regionally, or is this a different kind of magic beans for the New Day?
Lots of digital types who are being trained on clickbait traffic drivers (and those who hold the tape measures) could be raising some eyebrows…
‘go to where the audience is’ they said. Will ‘they’ be in TM let alone media in 5 years ?
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Bottom line is that digital dosent pay!
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Clearly they have, just take a look at the latest ABC figures if you need proof.
So with people falling out of love with print, thousands of local advertisers walking away in their droves and taking their once taken for granted ad revenue budgets with them and no one able to monetise online sites despite years of trying what next for the uk regional press?
Adopt charity status while still paying the board members huge salaries and bonus’?
Anyone know?
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