Trinity Mirror has confirmed plans to launch a new national daily newspaper.
The Manchester Evening News and Liverpool Echo publisher will launch The New Day on Monday February 29th.
It will be the first standalone national daily newspaper for 30 years, and Trinity stressed it will be “an entirely new newspaper, not a sister title or light version of the Daily Mirror”.
The New Day editor Alison Phillips
The news comes just days after rival publisher Johnston Press confirmed it had bought the i newspaper in a £24m deal, triggering the Independent’s move to online-only.
The New Day will cover news and topical content but with “a modern style and tone”, aimed at women and men “who want something different from what is currently available”. It will have a core editorial staff of 25.
In contrast to its left-leaning national and regional titles, the said the new title will be “politically neutral”.
It will run to 40 pages every day and be “visually striking”. The price has been set at 50p – 10p more than the weekday edition of i – although it will be available for free from over 40,000 retailers on launch day and be available at 25p for two weeks after that.
Alison Phillips, Editor, The New Day, 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.”
Simon Fox, chief executive, Trinity Mirror, added: “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.”
