Mediapolis

Sly Bailey is finding it harder work running Trinity Mirror, even though she has cleaned up the mess left by Philip Graf. Selling Racing Post is hardly a very exciting strategy, but a bid for some or all of Emap would be far more interesting. After all, Ms Bailey used to run IPC Media and, frankly, Trinity Mirror needs to do something radical now. Think of it: a cut-price copy of Heat or Nuts for Mirror readers or, perhaps, given the soft sales of the tabloid, do it the other way around. Trinity Mirror has not yet registered interest in any bits of Emap, but you can be sure that the bankers are doing their best to hustle the newspaper group into the process. Good luck.

— The mood music from Kensington High Street, home to Daily Mail and General Trust, is that they know nothing much about running a magazine business – a pain for Ralph Bernard, who would like his 14 per cent shareholder to back him in a bid that would see his GCap take Emap’s radio arm and DMGT take the rest, including consumer magazines. The trouble is that DMGT reckons its skill is running and investing over the long term – and the thought of closing a struggling magazine is anathema to it. Not so dynamic there.

— Don’t believe Mondadori’s on-the-record denial that it is interested in Emap’s consumer magazines. It is. Italian publishing is complex.

— Nobody seems to have been paying much attention outside the specialist property press, but earlier this month the Barclay twins sold the Telegraph’s Victoria headquarters for about £225 million to the Greek shipping magnate Achilleas Kallakis. They had bought it for £156 million 16 months earlier, which shows that there is a way to make money out of newspapers. The gain nicely offsets the £25 million that the family has had to plough into the Telegraph, over and above the £665 million purchase price, since taking ownership of the Telegraph titles from Lord Black of Crossharbour.

The Times Business Sector