Trinity Mirror: Failure of New Day won’t stop us experimenting
James Wildman, chief revenue officer, Trinity Mirror Solutions
“It’s better to try and fail than not to try at all,” Trinity Mirror’s chief revenue officer, James Wildman, said in response to the decision to axe The New Day after just two months.
But Trinity Mirror refuses to dwell on the past and is using the lessons learned from its failed project to prepare for a stronger commercial future, it said this week.
“In a sector as fast-moving as media currently is, it’s absolutely critical to innovate and I’m proud that I work for a company that was prepared to take that risk,” Wildman said during a Mediatel and Trinity Mirror debate discussing the future of print.
“7.2 million people still buy a newspaper every single day in the UK – just not enough of them bought The New Day. It means print is declining but it’s still very much alive and kicking; it’s not dead.”
Wildman’s comments come during a moment of change for the newspaper market, with the closure of the Independent’s print titles – the first national newsbrand to move wholly online – happening just weeks before The New Day had its launch and hasty demise.
Admitting that The New Day’s distribution model was a contributing factor to its closure, Wildman said that the ways in which Trinity can now look to innovate around distribution and packaging content will be “increasingly interesting”.
However, Wildman said much of Trinity’s future innovation will be in the digital space where the publisher’s national online titles attract 4.5 million people every day – and 19 million mobile readers each month.
From an agency perspective, MediaCom’s chief strategy officer, Sue Unerman, said Trinity was right to experiment with revenue streams to figure out what works best for the print model.
“The industry is still diversifying; it’s still trying to work out what works. The old business model is broken and there are all sorts of structural problems that belong to the last century,” she said.
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“The best thing to do is to try a diversification of revenue streams – whether that’s from advertising, a subscription model, from sales or distribution – because newspapers are at a point where if you’re expecting someone to go and spend 50p on something, and you haven’t done that in the past, that’s a big ask.”
In future, Unerman argued newsbrands should be looking to establish partnerships – a model based on “shared risk, shared reward“.
“If something works and newsbrands are as strong as I believe them to be, then I can’t see that there’s any downside for a newsbrand to do that,” she said.
“That kind of innovation and creativity would totally shift the model.”
Elsewhere, Trinity CEO Simon Fox said he had no regrets about not buying the i newspaper which was picked up by Johnston Press earlier this year – particularly after the acquisition of Local World, which added an extra 83 regional titles to Trinity’s portfolio.
The £220 million deal, which Trinity said will see the full network of publishing websites deliver 120 million monthly unique browsers and 790 million monthly page views, could now look like a useful move as ‘hyperlocal targeting’ becomes a much more attractive proposition to advertisers.
However, Unerman said while hyperlocalism is starting to work for MediaCom’s brands, it is still a complicated thing to do.
“The question will be – and it’s to do with the selling of it – who will benefit from it?,” she said.
“The difference between TV sales houses and newsbrand sales houses is that it’s easier to spend money quickly in TV than it is in newsbrands…but we are, in terms of outcomes, definitely seeing uplift.”
Wildman, who revealed Trinity Mirror currently sells 800,000 copies a day across its 29 daily titles, said it is “incumbent” on newspapers to make it easier to buy hyperlocally – and that Trinity will continue to invest in leveraging its local reach with “ever more creative executions”.