Trinity Mirror must re-grow digital business after CEO’s exit

The staff and some leading shareholders of one of the UK’s leading news publishers have got their way – Trinity Mirror CEO Sly Bailey will leave the company after 10 years by year’s end.

In the group, which has downsized during the industry’s profound contraction, Bailey’s total £1.7 million salary package had become a bugbear to its local newspaper reporters, and leading shareholders were due to vote against her remuneration at next week’s AGM.

Although Trinity Mirror has, like all publishers, lost core circulation and advertising revenue, it has barely moved the dial on its digital business performance, which last year was below even 2008 levels.

“We level the blame at Sly Bailey and the directors – they conditioned people in Britain to expect free content,” the chief reporter of Trinity Mirror’s own Media Wales, Martin Shipton, said last year, decrying “the greedy pursuit of unsustainably high profits”.

Still, the company’s statement announcing her exit claims: “Importantly, Sly has also established the basis of a digital strategy for the Group going forward.”

Amongst Bailey’s last acts had been reorganising the publisher’s digital leadership last year. Mirror.co.uk traffic fell after a site redesign.

Bailey’s exit will lighten the wage bill at Trinity Mirror, which has downsized its headcount from 8,000 in 2008 to 6,000 in 2011.

Magazine publisher Future also jettisoned its CEO, Stevie Spring, in October in a cost-saving exercise.

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