You read it here first: the Daily Mirror will be sold within six months

Is the Daily Mirror for sale? It is, according to a well-placed City source. He says it is being offered around to ‘the buy-out boys’. My instinct is that he is right, and that Trinity Mirror wants to offload its troubled national daily, as well as its other national titles.

Until 1999 Trinity Mirror was Trinity, a strong group publishing profitable regional titles. Then it made what has turned out to be the serious mistake of buying Mirror Group Newspapers. For although Trinity had plenty of experience with regionals such as the Birmingham Post and the Liverpool Echo, it knew little or nothing about the very different business of publishing red-top national newspapers. In Sir Victor Blank it acquired a chairman who, though he had been a successful merchant banker, was ignorant of the newspaper business. This might not have mattered had not the company’s long-term chief executive, Philip Graf, been equally at sea in the world of national newspapers.