Britain’s new daily has no leading articles, no website, and columnists but no columns: can it drag readers back to print?

A new national daily paid-for newspaper launched on Monday, aiming to tempt readers who have fallen out of love with print media at a time when the medium is widely considered to be in long term decline.



Two million copies of the New Day will be given away on the first day, as the turquoise-branded upstart attempts to spark a revival in readership and gain ground against the mid-market Mail and Express.

The first edition featured a report on the plight of child carers, David Cameron writing on Brexit - head-to-head with a teacher writing in defence of the EU, and the new pop-royalty romance between One Direction and Girls Aloud.



The New Day lives up to its promise to be a different kind of daily Read more

Trinity Mirror, publisher of the traditionally Labour-supporting Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror, is showing optimism in launching the mid-market title during the Independent titles’ final weeks as a national newspaper.

The editor, Alison Phillips, who previously headed the Sunday Mirror and Sunday People, said the New Day was predicated on an alternative way of thinking about how a newspaper should work.

She said the weekday title would be upbeat and optimistic and free of political bias, unlike most tabloid rivals, and it would not have the traditional leader column setting out the paper’s views on the day’s big topics.

“Because we’ve started from scratch, we’ve thrown out all the previous thinking on how a newspaper should be structured and started with a blank piece of paper,” she said. “The idea is that this paper should give you in 40 pages everything on any given day in a 30-minute read, without being bombarded with content you don’t need.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Is the future turquoise? The New Day Photograph: Trinity Mirror/PA

From Tuesday the New Day will be sold from the newsstand priced at 25p for its first two weeks, rising to 50p after that.

It is the first national daily paid-for title to launch since the i was founded in 2010 as a cut-price offshoot of the Independent, and which is set to outlast its forbear. Struggling with years of declining sales, the Independent is due to close in March, at a time when the sales of all the established daily titles are declining.

The basic news content will be drawn from Mirror Online, the Daily Mirror and Press Association copy, mostly in digest form. Repurposing of wider news and the writing of the main analysis and features will be down to a small team of 25 staff.

The publisher’s most eye-catching decision is not to have a website – a decision normally considered anathema among newspapers focused on post-newsprint survival. Instead it will have a presence on Facebook and Twitter .

Simon Fox, the chief executive of Trinity Mirror, said the title “did have a digital strategy. “I don’t think right now there is a market gap for another essentially breaking news website. The market is fiercely competitive, with not only existing players but also a whole bunch of new entrants. We don’t see a gap to fill there,” he said.

Trinity Mirror has a target of a “settle down” sale of 200,000 copies, a number Fox said he “would be comfortable with”, although break-even is thought to be closer to half that.

Fox said the overall aim was not to start a war of reader attrition with rivals, but to target the 500,000 readers per year who the publisher believes have stopped buying papers. “If we can tempt people back in [who have] for whatever reason fallen out of love, that is the goal,” he says. “It is about coming up with a brand new product and trying to grow the whole market.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A TV ad asks readers to ‘seize the New Day’.

The gap the publisher does believe it has spotted is in the mid-market, putting it in competition with the Daily Mail and Richard Desmond’s Daily Express. Phillips said: “The Mail is a fantastic product, however I think we can appeal to a lot of people across the market who feel they are not getting something that speaks to them. We are speaking to modern families in the language they use and with the positivity about what they feel in their lives.”

She said the New Day intended to differentiate itself from the right-leaning Mail or Express with what she described as balanced opinion over sensationalist headlines and copy.

“Time and again the thing that comes up in research is a desire for balanced opinion,” she said. So many people have said to me there isn’t a paper out there for them. There is a need that can be met across the whole market.”

New Day will be profitable this year if it attracts readers, says Trinity Mirror Read more

There will be five or six regular columnists, but unlike most rivals they will not write for fixed days of the week, instead publishing ad hoc. “ I don’t think with this product people will want to wait five or six days to hear from a columnist,” said Phillips.

The market opportunity barely includes Scotland, it seems: only a few thousand copies per day will be sold there – and only in Edinburgh.

Media buyers believe this low print run is a move to protect Trinity Mirror’s Daily Record, second only to the Sun in Scotland and selling 171,000 copies per day.

Distribution will be ramped up, but at launch the product will not have dedicated Scottish content, and the fear is it may be rejected as “too English”.

“Given everything going on in Scotland, with elections in May and significant differences around areas such as police, health and education, a launch in Scotland without a proper Scottish editorial team seemed like a bad move,” Fox said. “The last thing we want is to be rejected in the market as an English product.”