In April the Daily Mirror relaunched itself as a more serious newspaper. Its editor, Piers Morgan, got rid of its red masthead. He hired supposedly upmarket writers such as John Pilger and Christopher Hitchens, and resurrected the famous Cassandra column. Mr Morgan invoked the name of Hugh Cudlipp, who edited the Daily Mirror in the 1950s, when it offered more serious journalism to the working classes and sold more than four million copies a day. His changes were widely welcomed, particularly by pundits in the broadsheet press who know rather little about Hugh Cudlipp or red-top tabloids. Even this column wished him well.
Four months on, Mr Morgan’s experiment seems to have failed. He has spent a considerable portion of the £20 million given to him on a futile price war with the Sun. At 2.09 million copies a day in July, the Daily Mirror’s circulation was down by nearly 6 per cent over 12 months.
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