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TWST: Can you give us a brief historical sketch behind the Trinity Mirror (London: TNI.L) and bring us up to date on how the company is positioned today?

Mr. Graf: Trinity Mirror was formed in late 1999 from the merger of two companies. Trinity PLC was company, which had been built mainly during the 1990s by a whole series of acquisitions to become the largest regional newspaper group in the United Kingdom, merged with Mirror group which consisted of the Daily Mirror, the Sunday People, the Sunday Mirror, the Daily Record and the Sunday Mail in Scotland, and Midland Independent newspapers which was a large regional newspaper group based in Birmingham and Coventry. Since then, the group has acquired South News, which is a major publisher in the London area. The purpose of which was to balance the group’s portfolio, which was largely weighted toward the middle and the north of the country with its regional newspapers. It’s current operations consist of the national newspaper division, which is The Daily Mirror, The Sunday Mirror, The People, The Daily Record, The Sunday Mail and also as part of that general operation The Racing Post and our printing operations where national newspapers are based in Watford, Olden and CarDonald. The regional newspaper division consists of what were former Trinity businesses, which are 240 daily, weekly, paid for and free titles throughout Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland. The main places where we operate are in Newcastle, Birmingham, Liverpool, Cardiff. There are substantial businesses in London and substantial weekly newspapers in Scotland and in the northwest of England, and a small business in Huddersfield.

TWST: How is the advertising revenue stream performing at present? Is advertising in the national and the regional business reacting differently to the economic downturn?

Mr. Graf: Relatively speaking, this year our regional newspaper business has done very well in advertising terms. The first half of the year we were looking at declines in advertising of only 2.5%. Currently we are looking at growth in our advertising revenues in our regional businesses. Basically where we have been affected, where the U.K. has been affected, is very substantially in the southeast, particularly in the London. If we were to exclude our southeast and London businesses, we would be seeing some quite strong growth in our businesses throughout the rest of the United Kingdom, particularly in places such as Liverpool, Newcastle and in Cardiff. And that’s being driven by continuing good growth in job advertising outside London, and also really quite good growth in national advertising. Those are the two areas where we have seen the best relative performance I think in our businesses.

TWST: What’s the overall game plan for the company over the next 24 months?

Mr. Graf: The game plan, looking forward over the next 2 to 3 years, in general terms for this business, will be to continue to build on the success of our current operational strategies. There are two main thrusts to our strategy: one is a program in the regional businesses called “From Biggest to Best”, and that is a comprehensive program designed to re-engineer our business and introduce much tighter, much more coordinated, much more single company focus in our regional divisions using best practice, using regionalization, using much more shared information, looking to share services across that business. The objective here is very clear, it is to turn our margins from about 24% at EBIT level to around 30% by 2005. We are making excellent progress on that and the thrust on investment in our business over the next two years or at least 18 months will be in furthering our progress and building on the successes so far. The second element of our business, the national newspapers, we have invested quite a lot of money in over the last year or so, basically in terms of developing the value of the Daily Mirror as a business. The Daily Mirror is the cornerstone of the national newspaper business, and there we have looked at sharpening and developing the brand of the Daily Mirror. We’ve looked at making significant changes and improvements to the newspaper itself and we’ve invested significantly in a promotion program designed to drive up the frequency of readership. Our analysis to drive value from that business was about improving the relative circulation performance and improving the relative circulation performance was about encouraging existing Mirror readers, i.e. those who had propensity to read the Mirror, to read it more often. With a clear brand and product proposition we’re looking to get those people to buy into that to move the paper forward, and by doing that we increase the value of the shareholders of our business.