It has been a bad year so far for Trinity Mirror, with the Daily Record down by 9.2% for the year to 514,488, and Sunday newspaper The People down by a whopping 16.2% for the year to just 1.1m copies. The Daily Mirror's sister Sunday title has also suffered, dropping 9% to 1,603,578.
New chief executive Sly Bailey has just taken direct control of these titles, with Mark Haysom leaving his role as managing director of national newspapers. The slump in year-on-year circulations is likely to raise more talk of a national newspaper sell-off at Trinity Mirror.
The ABC's March 2003 figures, however, do not show the full impact that the war in Iraq has had on circulation of the national newspapers, but the pro-war Sun saw a rise of 5,000 copies between February and March, while the Daily Mirror's anti-war stance saw it drop 45,000 copies to 1,997,846.
However, the Mirror was not alone in seeing a dramatic fall. The Daily Mail dropped 40,000 on February, to 2,341,999 for March 2003, although this was a 1% rise year on year.
Both The Guardian and The Independent saw modest increases, with The Guardian adding 4,000 in March to 396,849, a year-on-year rise of 3.9%, and The Independent up by 1,500. However, the Independent saw a year-on-year fall of 1.13%, taking it to just 189,664.
The Financial Times has risen in March, but this is because it added 21,000 copies abroad. At home, it lost around 2,000 copies and year on year it was down by 3.5% to 453,282.
On Friday, the Mirror used a comic strip of Iraqi minister of information Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, a cult figure from the Iraq war, to poke fun at its falling circulation. The strip highlighted his legendary optimism and willingness to stretch the truth by proclaiming: "The Daily Mirror mercenaries will soon be selling 5m copies again -- trust me." Although there has been some debate whether this was intentional or, more likely, it is being seen as the work of a cheeky sub-editor.
During the last Gulf War, the Mirror's circulation fell below 3m. The current crisis in circulation follows editor Piers Morgan's relaunch of the newspaper in the post-September 11 climate as a more serious read. He dumped the red-top masthead in favour of more sober black, and declared war on trivial coverage.
While his changes may have seemed in step with the times, the fact is that celebrity-focused titles in other media have gone from strength to strength, and the Daily Star has recorded a 12.5% rise in circulation year on year to 849,689.
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