So Trinity Mirror has become the UK’s biggest regional newspaper publisher by acquiring full ownership of Local World.
The deal has been justifiably projected by Trinity Mirror’s chief executive, Simon Fox, as “transformative”. It empowers the group to increase levels of necessary digital investment and also enables it to present a larger audience to advertisers.
No surprise then that he is delighted at the outcome of longer-than-expected negotiations. “It’s a really good deal for us,” he says.
“Size does matter, giving us a stronger capability to invest in order to build better digital products. It will therefore help to accelerate change as we cope with a world that’s far from easy.”
By adding 80-plus titles to its portfolio across a swathe of England and Wales where it has never had a footprint, it means that “new Trinity” will publish 13 of the top 20 paid-for regional dailies.
Trinity Mirror and Local World are geographically complementary, so it is not expected that title closures will result from the deal.
And the enlarged group can also boast a total of 120m monthly unique online visitors as a selling point to advertisers. “It makes us a more serious player in the digital space,” says Fox, reminding me once again that he sees Facebook and Google as the company’s main rivals for eyeballs.
In this, he echoes another regional newspaper chief executive, Ashley Highfield of Johnston Press, who also believes it important for greater UK press consolidation in order to compete with Silicon Valley’s giants.
But hasn’t Trinity Mirror’s outlay increased its indebtedness? Evidently, this is not a concern. “Our debt is well within a prudent ratio,” says Fox. Nor will Trinity, which is sensitive about pensions because of its Maxwell history, face a pension problem because Local World had no such liabilities (they remained with DMGT when Local World was formed in 2012 from its Northcliffe Media division).
One of the deal’s complexities was the desire of Iliffe Media to retain the Cambridge News plus a couple of paid-for weeklies and seven free titles. So they are being sold back to that group.
Overall, this does appear to be a shrewd acquisition by Trinity Mirror as the publisher seeks to overcome the continuing pressures of surviving and thriving in an increasingly perilous environment.
Print advertising, which seemed to be recovering earlier this year, has fallen away again. And the rise in digital advertising volumes and revenues appears to have slowed in recent months too.
A bigger audience will help, of course, and in Britain Trinity Mirror can boast that it is now a giant. In global terms, however, Facebook is a behemoth.
In order to offer real competition, Trinity must now enhance its USP: the provision of genuinely local (and, yes, hyperlocal) news and information. Therefore, at the micro level, it must cosset the people who obtain that news: its journalists.
At the macro level, it must continue to invest and innovate in order to give those journalists the very best digital tools.
After the boardroom smiles following the success of the Local World deal fade, there will be much work still to be done.
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