Trinity Mirror chief executive Simon Fox has predicted the group's new daily newspaper will be profitable by the end of the year due to its low cost base
For the sake of the new staff it had better be - Fox added his prediction is effectively a deadline for the New Day, the first standalone title to hit UK newsstands in 30 years, and if it isn't in the black, it faces being scrapped.
The New Day was launched today with its two million-strong first edition free to drum up interest. It will sell for 25p from tomorrow for the remainder of an opening two-week discount period before settling at its eventual price of 50p. Trinity Mirror, home to the Daily and Sunday Mirror as well as the Sunday People, hopes to attract 200,000 readers, many of whom are not currently reading a daily newspaper.
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The model is similar to that operated by i, the soon-to-be online-only Independent's spin-off launched in 2010. It took a year to reach 200,000 readers at a price of 20p. The paper has since doubled its charge to 40p and was earlier this month sold for £24m to local publisher Johnson Press.
Like i, the New Day offers bite-size news largely corralled from across the publisher's stable of national and local titles. It is being billed as politically neutral, "optimistic" and designed to "co-exist" in a world increasingly dominated by digital media. It will not have its own website.
A small team of 25 journalists led by Alison Phillips, the editor of the Sunday Mirror, will pull the paper together each day and go to print in what are effectively "down times" before the main national print runs gear up, Fox told The Guardian. This will help it move into profit by the end of this year, if it hits its reader targets, he added.
But he also told the London Evening Standard that the company is "realistic" and that if the new project "is not profitable going into 2017 we won't carry on". Reader numbers will not be disclosed until May, when the official Audit Bureau of Circulation will give numbers for April.
The launch coincided with the release today of Trinity Mirror's annual results. Profit fell 17 per cent to £67m, although when one-off costs are stripped out, underlying profits rose five per cent to £107.5m. On the down side, revenues were down seven per cent to £592.7m on the back of a 17 per cent fall in print advertising.
Mirror owner confirms new newspaper in week of Indy closure
18 February
Last week's announcement of the impending move of The Independent and the Independent on Sunday to online-only editions appeared to confirm the inexorable demise of printed news in the UK.
But at least one publisher thinks the death of newspapers has been greatly exaggerated. Trinity Mirror, which owns already the Daily Mirror, the Sunday Mirror and the Sunday People, will launch a new national print newspaper at the end of this month.
Sky News, which first revealed the launch confirmation, described the paper, titled New Day, as a "tabloid" that "is expected to compete" with i, the concise daily that syndicates content from The Independent and that has just been sold to Johnston Press to £24m. It will similarly present news in a "bitesize" format reflecting the way readers "consume content online", says The Drum.
Rather than trying to take audience from i, however, which has grown its circulation to 270,000 over the past five years and was the last profitable part of the Independent print stable, The Guardian cites sources that claim New Day will attempt to bring in new readers from a "mid-market" that would otherwise be served by the Daily Mail and Daily Express.
New Day, whose title could yet change, is expected to be priced at 20p at its launch and is aiming for an initial print run of one million copies. Trinity Mirror hopes this will settle to an i-equivalent number between 200,000-300,000, with the price eventually rising "to anything up to less than £1".
While some may question the wisdom of moving into printing more newspapers at a time of decline for the wider industry, the success of The Independent's concise sister title proves it can be at least modestly lucrative.
In a note to clients reported by Press Gazette, broker Peel Hunt said the launch is a "low-risk strategy that could prove usefully accretive even on fairly modest volumes". If it shares content with other papers across Trinity Mirror, its costs would be relatively low and "a 20p newspaper with a circulation of 300,000 could generate Trinity Mirror incremental revenue of £18.7m".
If it fails, it would simply join a list of experiments at Trinity Mirror that have been dropped after not building sufficient volume, including web-based news portals UsVsTh3m and Ampp3d.
