Papers in turmoil as campaign launched to save the Mirror

Every single newspaper saw a fall in circulation year-on-year for the month of May – with the Telegraph suffering the biggest slump, down 16.49 per cent to under 700,000 copies a day – while the Times is down 12.82%, the Guardian 10.47%, the Express 7.79%, the Mirror 6.57%, the Indy 4.85%, the Mail 3.86% and the FT 2.69%. Even the papers which have slashed their cover price, the Star and the Sun, are also down, by 2.11 and 1.61 per cent respectively.

The latest circulation figures come as Trinity Mirror announced the axing of 200 more staff, on top of the loss of 1,700 jobs, one in five of all jobs, from the group last year. Labour MP Austin Mitchell has submitted an early day motion, backed by 24 MPs, contesting the job cuts.

A ‘Save The Mirror’ Facebook group has also been established, with more than 1,500 members, many of whom them well known and respected journalists and MPs; you can join the group here and tweet @savethemirror and #savethemirror.

Jeremy Dear, general secretary of the National Union of Journalists, called the redundancies “neanderthal”, adding:

“It’s disgraceful that against a background of making more than £70 million in profit last year and of paying millions in remuneration to a handful of Trinity Mirror execs, the company should now throw more than a quarter of its talented, hardworking workforce onto the scrap heap.”

Over at News International, meanwhile, the Times paywall has been dubbed an “empty world”, with only 15,000 people signing up and agreeing to pay money to access the Times’s content, and 12,500 paying for the seperate iPad application.

Michael Wolff, respected US journalist and commentator, writes of the dismal figures:

“He [Murdoch] is not reporting on himself because even less than most news outlets, Murdoch outlets have no objective sense when it comes to their own interests (or the boss’s interests), or willingness to ask questions which the boss might find uncomfortable, or penchant for anything but the party line. The news from News Corp. is always snarlingly good—even when it is very bad.

“My sources say that not only is nobody subscribing to the website, but subscribers to the paper itself—who have free access to the site—are not going beyond the registration page. It’s an empty world…

“It’s a big story—but you won’t read about it in the papers that know it best.”