In the wake of the firing of the Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror editors, there was a brief increase in Trinity Mirror's share price. It didn't exactly zoom up, though for an hour or so last Thursday it did show a 6% rise before falling back again. In City parlance it was a dead cat bounce.
The supposed reason for this rise was the claim that the departed Mirror editors, Richard Wallace and Tina Weaver, had been trying to engineer a management buy-out.
I couldn't stand up that story then, nor have I done so since after further research. From the widespread press silence, I imagine other correspondents have also failed to do so. Stockbroking analysts are also sceptical.
Anyway, the important factor to take on board this week is the real story - the firings have had a decidedly negative effect on the share price. Today, it reached a 12-month low of 25.35p, giving the company a market capitalisation of just £62.5m.
The heralding of the cost-cutting seven-day operation at the two titles has not made the slightest difference to the City's view of a publisher led by a lame duck chief executive, Sly Bailey.
I've often felt in the last couple of years that I've been the only critic of Trinity Mirror's dire performance.
So I commend Peter Preston's trenchant commentary in The Observer in which he forecast that the seven-day Mirror "will merely accelerate decline" and described it as "another botch of despair that has nothing to offer anyone involved, apart from a few more years of shrinking profits."
As for the way Wallace and Weaver were treated - having been escorted from the building within minutes of their firing - he wrote: "Even the reviled Rupert treats his editors better, and more loyally, than this. Even he believes in journalism rather than the offensive routine of cleared desks."
