The sun sets on the New Day today (6 May) just two months after it became the first standalone newspaper to launch in this country for three decades.
It lasted a grand total of nine weeks and just over 50 issues before Trinity Mirror pulled the plug on the ailing publication.
It had hoped to sell around 200,000 daily copies, but sales had reportedly fallen to about 40,000.
For a former journalist who maintains a keen interest in the wellbeing of print newspapers this sudden closure is a depressing development.
But, while I don’t want to gloat during a post-mortem, its demise was also very predictable.
I read New Day throughout its first week on the newsstands and found a newspaper which appeared confused about its identity and lacking knowledge about its audience. On our media training courses we are constantly telling delegates that it is all about the audience, but here was a national newspaper that didn’t appear to know who it was talking to.
I also found it contained very, very little news. The latest stories were squeezed into the first few pages, the majority of which were reduced to little more than 'News In Brief' items. Sport coverage was even sparser at just two pages lost in the middle of the paper and an early print run meant it could not even provide the latest results (It was unable to report on Leicester City winning the Premier League in its edition on Tuesday).
What readers were left with was plenty of opinion pieces and in depth features – a strange concept for a paper supposedly aimed at ‘time-poor’ readers.
There was also no website which always felt like an odd move in the digital age.
Perhaps the biggest failing through was price. Although the first edition was free and the rest of the first week’s copies priced at 25p, it then carried a 50p price – a considerable sum when you will find more news in the Metro.
In short, there was nothing beyond curiosity in that first week for me to buy it every day and it seems that many others were similarly reluctant to part with the coins in their pockets.
So, is this another nail in the coffin of print newspapers?
Losing two national titles in the first part of the year is desperately sad but New Day and The Independent both had very low readerships and it seems unlikely others will follow suit anytime soon.
In fact some predict a healthy future. Ted Young, the Metro editor told Press Gazette: “Metro continues to go from strength to strength – we now have 3.3 million readers every day. Metro proves there is a future for newspapers.”
So don’t pen those obituaries just yet.
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