Why we need the Daily Mirror

Every morning, the people of this country wake up to a choice of 12 national newspapers. It’s a selection unmatched in number anywhere in the world. And eclectic, except for one thing.

During the last election, only one of those daily papers—the Daily Mirror—supported the Labour party. The Guardian backed the Lib Dems, as did The Independent. The rest of the broadsheet and tabloid press supported the Tories.

In a healthy democracy, it’s generally understood that it’s a good thing for the national press to represent the views of all the major political parties.

That’s why we should not look the other way now that the Mirror is being brought to its knees by editorial cuts so savage that there will only be 12 news reporters left in its Canary Wharf head office running a 24-hour news operation and filling a 70-page paper every day. Investigations, exclusives and campaigns all take creative energy and man hours. Pared down to the bone, the Mirror becomes an empty shell, its staff having no time to do anything but fill the paper with wire reports.

This matters because for the last 100 years, the Mirror has filled a unique position in this country’s media, as the paper of the Labour working class.

With its banner “Forward with the People” it campaigned for the establishment of the NHS after the second world war.

By opposing the Suez invasion, the Falklands War, and most recently the invasion of Iraq, it has often challenged the views of its own readers—especially on the first two.

It put the concerns of the “common man” first. AJP Taylor said that in the Daily Mirror, “the English people at last found their voice.”

By inventing the original sledgehammer headline style, the Mirror has also been responsible for some of the boldest and most iconic front pages ever put into print.

In the 1960s, the paper shocked Britain with a picture of a Canadian hunter clubbing a baby seal to death to draw attention to the annual cull. During the Thatcher years, it exposed the depths of poverty under Thatcher with its Waste of a Nation series.

Even though it was unlikely to boost desperately needed sales, most recently the paper has campaigned for justice for asbestos victims. And in the last election, it gave copious coverage to the Hope Not Hate Campaign to help keep the BNP out of working class areas.

So, even with the ups and downs in both boardroom and newsroom, the Mirror has managed to hang onto its reputation for independence and fairness. It is one reason that minorities and migrants to this country have always preferred it to the Daily Mail or The Sun.

Of course a company suffering from falling profits, as the Mirror is, has a duty to its investors. But herein lies one of its major problems. Unlike News International and Associated Newspapers, who publish the Sun and the Mail, the Mirror’s parent company Trinity Mirror is a PLC, serving shareholders.

Anyone running a newspaper shortchanges the readers at their peril—especially when the customers, as the Mirror's are, pay 45p for it, double the cost of The Sun and more than four times the price of the Daily Star.

When Chief Executive Sly Bailey arrived at the helm seven years ago, her first act was to axe 550 jobs across the paper’s holding group—and since then she has kept on cutting. The view in the City seems to be it’s her only strategy and that she needs more imagination.

Yet last year, while the company's pre-tax profits fell by 41 per cent in a year of 1,700 job losses across Trinity Mirror, Bailey took home a pay package of £1.6m. Meanwhil,e a Mirror reporter’s starting salary has not substantially risen for 15 years—it still stands at around £30,000. Still, many journalists kept working for the paper because they were proud of what it stood for.

Then in June came the news that a further 200 editorial staff, a quarter of the remaining journalists, must now go at the Mirror and its sister titles the Sunday Mirror and Sunday People.

Running down editorial and filling the paper with agency reports is unlikely to be the answer. Sooner or later, readers will cotton on that there is nothing special or different about their paper.

It would be great if there were even a glimmer of hope in the development of the Mirror’s website. But alas, it’s one of the most clunky of any national newspaper. The last figures showed that Mirror Group Digital attracts just over 500,000 visitors a month—less than a quarter of the Mail's online readership.

Just before the round of latest cuts in June, Trinity Mirror lost its place in the FTSE 250, the elite group of Britain’s largest quoted companies. As the Mirror is not only the flagship of Trinity Mirror, but also its cash cow, this looks like commercial suicide.

How can the Daily Mirror be saved? Well, the first positive step would be to replace Ms Bailey with a chief executive with more vision—and a better appreciation of how the media is changing. For as it stands, the paper’s former editor Roy Greenslade has questioned if the Mirror will even exist in five years time—and many people think that’s optimistic.

Of course, the Mirror is just suffering the fate of many businesses. Newspapers come and go. Why should the Mirror be any different?

Its loss would be a tragedy because the Mirror still holds a unique place in the affections of the nation. I don’t think it is too sentimental to say it is the paper which is most closely identified with the best of Labour working class values. That it stands up for the underdog, solidarity and pride in hard work. But those ideas have dated, the trade unions have almost disappeared outside the public sector, and the Labour party itself has moved on. Maybe it is time for the Mirror to be dispatched to the knacker's yard.

For the sake of democracy, journalism and this country, I hope not.