Sad truth about Daily Mirror readers: they like it dumb

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. Its sales in August are believed to be even weaker. Meanwhile the Sun has increased month by month to 3.6 million copies, and is slightly ahead of where it was this time last year. More spectacularly, Richard Desmond’s Daily Star, which has considerably increased its already generous quotient of ‘tit ‘n’ bum’, has soared by over 15 per cent year-on-year to 736,088 copies a day.

The Daily Mirror has been losing sales since 1970. Between September 1995, when Mr Morgan became editor, and last April its circulation had declined by some 400,000 copies. But the decline has accelerated since Mr Morgan emerged triumphant from his laboratory four months ago. Its seems that the Daily Mirror’s readers do not all like the new emphasis on serious journalism and the paper’s less reverential treatment of celebrities. Of course, it is easy to exaggerate these changes, and on many days – for example, in its coverage of the disappearance of the two girls in Soham – the Daily Mirror doesn’t seem very different.