THE Daily Mirror is to launch a new Wednesday magazine to boost its editorial package.

The launch of 3am Magazine, named after its 3am girl reporters, will try to ride the celebrity bandwagon and complement other Mirror magazines such as We Love Telly!

The move suggests that Sly Bailey, chief executive of Trinity Mirror and former chief of the IPC magazine group, sees the magazine market as an important weapon in the tabloid sales war. Ms Bailey has already announced plans to create a new magazine unit at Trinity Mirror to build “a centre of excellence”.

Phil Hall, former Editor of the News of the World and Editor-in-Chief of Hello magazine, will run the new unit.

“What we are looking to get is professional, paid-for magazine quality into the sections and supplements that we produce,” the Trinity executive said. Ms Bailey insisted that there were “no plans at the moment” to use the unit to launch new paid-for magazines. But such a move might be possible in future.

What is clear is that the “centralisation” of magazine and supplement production is just a small part of plans to achieve a higher level of integration at the company, formed by the merger of Trinity, the regional publisher, and the Mirror group.

Ms Bailey said that she was conducting a complete review of the group’s printing arrangements, currently spread across more than 40 presses at 12 sites. She is planning to find a better match between demand and capacity and the result could be centralisation into a smaller number of sites. The company announced this week that a printing plant in Huddersfield is to close.

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