Cost cutting key rationale for Trinity Mirror’s Express swoop

Comment Martin Flanagan

the combined costbase. There is likely to be de-duplication in back of house operations like finance, personnel, sales and marketing. Journalists are unlikely to escape the fire, with a planned “sharing” of teams across sport and features, again a theme of the wider sector.

Trinity chief executive Simon Fox says it won’t apply to the political writers, but that was a given in light of the notably different political stances of the left-wing Mirror titles and right-wing Express. You mess with that, and it would have been commercial suicide given the readerships, so we are talking as much about pragmatic self-interest as anything more high-falutin.

Both Fox at Trinity and Desmond at the Express have already stripped out big costs in recent years. Like Mark Carney at the Bank of England on rate rise guidance earlier this week, this deal probably allows the new owner to go further, faster on costs.

The consolidation is a reaction to the industry-wide challenges of a slide in print advertising and Facebook and Google eating print’s lunch. For journalists at the titles, the transaction – unlikely to trouble the regulator on media plurality grounds – it might just look like the next chapter of the sector’s own Bleak House. building society to see a distinct fall in its mortgage market share shows how much tougher it is getting in the sector.

It is being squeezed by softening consumer confidence and greater competitiveness on mortgage pricing. Nationwide chief Joe Garner says net interest margins – the difference between what the society charges its borrowers and pays its savers – are holding up, but he is not making any promises that will continue.

My guess is Nationwide will batten down the hatches for at least 2018 and maybe into 2019, and take the new challenging reality on the chin for the short-term. The society’s natural conservatism suits the temper of the times.