First question: what have Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Coventry, Derby, Hull, Leicester, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle and Nottingham got in common, not to mention Plymouth, Stoke and Swansea? Answer: their dominant dailies will all be owned by Trinity Mirror once its £200m bid for Local World goes through.
Second question: is everyone happy? Well, our friend David Montgomery, presiding genius at Local World, will certainly find his bank manager £10m or more happier. And similar relief surely also goes for the Daily Mail and Iliffe groups, who handed their regionals over to him for £70m four years ago, and now stand to make a fat profit. Trinity Mirror shareholders like the move: they sent the market price zipping upwards last week as deal talk hardened. Sector analysts, recalling the good old local-press days when big was beautiful – and supposedly synergetic – seem pretty content too. From £70m to £200m in only three years? There’s life in the old fish and chip wrappings yet.
But try a grimace as well as a grin. The point about Local World, when Montgomery and Steve Auckland constructed it, was that the name meant something: devolution, local initiatives, reporters and ad teams based in the towns and cities they served, a Leicester HQ that raised two fingers to London. They wouldn’t spend big money. That wasn’t Monty’s favourite song. But they would try genuinely new approaches on the doorstep of the digital age.
Alas: the new world never got a real foothold before mission control in the ancestral Montgomery manner took over. Devolution wasn’t his bag. Auckland departed (to Metro and then to run the Lebedev empire). And Trinity Mirror, who took a slice of the action from the start, was always poised to follow a routine script: build a greater chain, claim growth as you add new links, spend central cash on standard online formats, seem to pound forward because otherwise mounting debt might drive you back. Oh! and see how few editorial and publishing hubs you need across hundreds of miles – because this isn’t really a local world at all.
