A New Day for News Print (or tomorrow’s fish and chip paper?)

Is the recently launched New Day publication worth your attention? We investigate the UK’s newest print newspaper.

At the beginning of March, newsgroup Trinity Mirror launched a new print brand into its UK newspaper portfolio called The New Day, just days after The Independent announced it would be retiring its print version from newsagent shelves. What’s the scoop?

At a time when online news outlets enjoy hundreds of millions of users per month (and all of the advertising revenue that entails), it’s interesting to see the industry investing in an entirely new product, particularly one without a website offering.

Before launch, the paper was described as a “modern, upbeat newspaper for modern, glass-half-full kind of people.” After five editions, has the newspaper lived up to its promise?

The New Day has more of a magazine-like feel than other newspapers on offer. The editor, Alison, addresses the reader in a short paragraph at the outset of each edition, and there’s far more colour and design than the traditional tabloids and broadsheets.

The structure of The New Day is refreshing – doing away with strict ‘sections’ for sports, celebs and so-called “women issues”, and mixing things up for a punchy effect.

Some of the paper has taken the successful Buzzfeed approach: including meme-style pictures, ‘life hacks’ and snapshots of information that would fit in a 140 character tweet. With more of us getting our information via social media, this format is recognisable and easy to digest. Whether it will be enough to lure a new generation to print newspapers remains to be seen.

Despite not having its own website, The New Day is careful not to ignore the digital arena. Certainly, from an editorial perspective, it’s happy to take cues from social media sites – readers are encouraged to like, share and comment on stories via Twitter and Facebook which should be used in following editions.

Billing itself as politically neutral, The New Day avoids regular columnists (usually mouthpieces for a paper’s political persuasion) and opts for ‘opinioneers’ from opposing views to debate the issues of the day.

It has been reported that in the first week, the paper enjoyed a circulation of around 150,000 readers, albeit at half the price it will retail for. This is a higher figure than many other newsprint papers (reports suggest that at its lowest, the print Indy was only selling 40,000 copies a day), and is certainly not to be sniffed at. Of course, at this stage it’s hard to determine whether it is the novelty factor or whether its creators have designed a newspaper that really has a USP in the modern age.

We’ll be watching closely as the paper evolves – whether it grows, shrinks, or disappears entirely is yet to be seen. Ultimately, the ever-changing media landscape never fails to surprise, and we, as communications professionals, must be ready for anything.

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