Trinity Mirror are doubling their planned cuts to £20m in an effort to remain in the black as print revenues fall and hacking payouts loom large. Expect to see more dead wood such as the recently axed digital projects Ampp3d and UsVsTh3m cut from the sinking ship…

By Guido’s calculations, £20 million is enough to pay off 133 hacking victims. The Mirror hacked at least 400 phones…

After the higher than they hoped damages awarded to Mirror phone hacking victims last week the struggling newspaper group admitted that “costs of settling claims is likely to be higher than previously anticipated we are increasing our provision to deal with matters arising from phone hacking by £16 million. This is in addition to the £12 million provided in 2014.” So the Mirror group has gone from denying that there was any hacking at all, to putting aside £12 million and now more than doubling the provision to £28 million…  

City investors are still worried that this is nowhere near enough and that the final figure will be nearer £100 million, the shares have been trading down since the ruling with £30 million knocked off the capitalisation this week. There is some question as to if the company will be able to pay a dividend…

Mirror Group Newspapers have been ordered to pay out £1.2 million to eight phone hacking victims following a three week hearing at London’s High Court. The payout, averaging £150,000 per victim is worrying news for the Mirror who had one single reporter hack around 400 phones. If just 400 more people sue and that level of payout continues, the Mirror could be looking at paying out around £60m. Significantly more than the £12 million they have put aside… 

Gazza £188k
Frost £260k
Shobna Gulati £117k
Shane Richie £155k
Lucy Taggart £157k
Alan Yentob £85k
Robert Ashworth £201k
Lauren Alcorn £78k

— Josh Halliday (@JoshHalliday) May 21, 2015

Trinity Mirror only made £102.3 million in pre-tax profit last year…

Last week when the Mirror canned their internetz projects all the online hacks claimed they weren’t being fired, rather things were just ‘under review’. Well it looks as if that review has now concluded:

https://twitter.com/MartinBelam/status/600665505142317056

They finally have the answer to who’s us and who’s them…

Mirror sources say staff working for their ill-fated online ventures, Ampp3d, UsVsTh3m and RowZed, are being made redundant. The operations will be closed immediately and staff have been told that the paper will try to find new roles for them. Apparently upstairs thought they were shi*e…

Martin Belam the founder of the titles boasted in a statement:

I’ve had the most amazing fun over the last couple of years. Watching millions of people play things like “Are you hated by the Daily Mail?” or read articles like “7 toilets that we’d rather have as justice secretary than Michael Gove” from a national newspaper group has been brilliant.

Wonder why they failed?

UPDATE: Here is an Ampp3d style statistical analysis of today’s news:

UPDATE II: Martin Belam appears to have enjoyed our report

https://twitter.com/MartinBelam/status/598514594101997568

See: National Papers Can’t Do the Internet

The Guardian supported Media Standards Trust has released research which is remarkable. The twitterati left have been making an issue of the treatment of Ed Miliband, the reporting of his nose picking and inability to eat a bacon sandwich or exit a TV stage without tripping up particularly vexes lefties who want reporting to be about boring issues rather than character. They have been particularly bilious about The Sun’s partisanship… 

The Mirror’s partisanship has gone unremarked in the broadsheets, the way it caricatures Tories as wicked toffs intent on closing down the NHS and grinding the poor into the workhouses is reportage from a surreal alternative reality. For the left the Sun’s journalism is partisan rubbish whereas the Mirror’s journalism is “campaigning”.

The above graphic is based on 7,000 articles analysed by the Media Standards Trust’s Election Unspun project. It found that the most partisan paper was The Mirror, which was more positive about Labour than The Sun was about the Tories and conversely The Mirror was more negative about the Tories than The Sun was about the Labour party. In short, The Mirror was the most partisan paper of all…