The Daily Mirror has launched a new app as it further develops its digital strategy – yet the title’s publisher, Trinity Mirror, said it was still committed to print despite the declining market.
“Print is difficult,” said chief executive Simon Fox on Monday. “Print is going backwards, the market is going backwards. Our objective is to out-perform the market. To win the going backwards race; to go backwards more slowly than our competitors.”
Fox also said that he had no “immediate plans” for further regional newspaper closures. In the last six months, Trinity has closed 18 titles, with some amalgamated into larger regional publications.
Trinity has also scaled back digital operations recently with staff working on UsVsTh3m, Ampp3d and Row Zed facing redundancy as resources are focused instead on the main areas of the Mirror site.
The Daily Mirror’s current print circulation stands at 881,545 and is down 8.4% year on year – whilst the entire daily market is down 7.8%.
The Sun – the title’s main rival – is down more than 10%, whilst the Daily Star is down almost 12%. Yet the Sun shifts almost 1.9 million copies – more than a million more each day.
It is a much better picture online, however, with Trinity Mirror’s national titles now ranked third behind Mail Online and theguardian.com with more than 3.8m unique daily browsers. Fox said that the digital side of the business has grown 96% over the last year.
The new app, to be rolled out on Tuesday, will include “new tools” for advertisers including geo-targeted and in-stream ads, as well as support for Trinity’s native advertising offering.
“We haven’t refreshed our apps for a couple of years,” Fox said. “but [this week] you’ll find a new app in the app store. It gives a much more personalised user experience; a much more intuitive, fast experience…we think the user experience is quite unique, actually.”
Users can customise the app to select which categories they are interested in as well as selecting their Premier League football team and opting into notifications for important news. It features a much greater number of these stories than previously, all available for offline reading.
When asked by Newsline if native advertising would play a larger role in Trinity’s commercial strategy, James Wildman, chief revenue officer of Trinity Mirror Solutions, said: “Native is clearly going to play a more important role in our business development.
“Where we’re having great success is engaging in an ever more meaningful and valuable way with our commercial partners – but not to the detriment of our readers.”
Asked if Trinity was still likely to increase its stake in regional publisher Local World or if it was still considering buying Express Newspapers, Fox was non-committal.
“The right deals would be attractive to us,” he said, “but which ones and when is not something I can comment on today.”
