Trinity Mirror executives in the Midlands have got it in the neck for laying off another 25 reporters and telling their residual staffs in Birmingham and Coventry that “the days are long gone when we could afford to be papers of record”. And the crassness gets worse. Here come “targets” (reader numbers, page clicks) for individual reporters. “Everyone will be expected – and helped – to grow their audiences.” Or else.
So it’s goodbye to comprehensive coverage. And it’s hello to 17 Sexy Things to See in Solihull, 18 Stupid Jokes About Smethwick, and 19 Quick Ways to Kill a Newspaper.
• Twitter is a resource much loved by journalists, who use it for breaking stories and watercooler gossip. But Twitter’s in trouble. It only has 300 million users, puny by Facebook standards – and a good lesson for tweeting journos. Newspaper sites deal in seemingly huge visitor numbers: 56 million a month for the Mail. So mighty in newsstand terms, but also so puny.
