But seriously, shares in Trinity Mirror up more than 10 per cent on the death of the Sunday Mirror’s biggest rival?
Daily Mail and General Trust shares were up 2.37 per cent, while Johnston Press was up 4.76 per cent.
We’re just a bit unconvinced. The Sun on Sunday is imminent — Murdoch would launch the very next Sunday after the News of The World goes down the skids, it’s his style — and we’d expect pricing to be uber-aggressive as well.
Numis media analyst Lorna Tilbian made this point in a note on Friday (while slapping a 60 pence price target on Trinity Mirror):
We expect Trinity Mirror’s shares to benefit strongly from a boost to sentiment and are upgrading from Hold to Buy accordingly. Although this should prove to be good news in the short to medium term, we believe it is unlikely that News International has exited the Sunday market for good and see scope for the group to launch a Sun on Sunday or variation thereof. Should this happen we would expect the company to compete aggressively (likely through cover price discounting) to regain market share.
More to the point — look at what happened yesterday. Murdoch pulled the plug on a print newspaper in its profitable prime, and probably managed to cut costs while doing it. Other operations at News Corp will barely blink: in fact, gaining control of BSkyB was the priority that needed protecting here. (Shares were down barely 0.5 per cent at pixel time.) The rot may not have stopped at News Corp but Murdoch’s reputation as a saviour of print media is just absurd now.
Related link:
Politicians prepare to tame the media ‘beast’ – FT