Daily Mirror publisher Trinity Mirror is launching Britain’s first new standalone nationalnewspaper for 30 years.
The New Day will be available for free at 40,000 retailers on the launch day, followed by a two-week trial at 25p.
It will then move to its full price of 50p.
The New Day, aims to stop news from “terrifying” readers with sensationalism, according to the title’s editor, Alison Phillips.
Phillips told BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme that readers “only have 30 minutes” and that the new paper would provide “what they need to know”.
Thanks for all your kind words about @thenewdayuk this morning. We can’t wait to get it out there next Monday. pic.twitter.com/8eqnMFZRxO
— Alison Phillips (@MirrorAlison) February 22, 2016
Chief executive Simon Fox said he hoped the paper would “arrest the decline” in newspaper readership.
It will have a presence on social media, but not its own website.
Trinity Mirror also promises no political bias, and no ‘leader’ column setting the paper’s views on the day’s big topics.
Alison Phillips told today programme host John Humphrys: “Why should I, as the editor of a newspaper, enforce my opinion on my readers?”
“We are not having a political line of our own, we will just tell the story straight.”
Phillips said the paper would target a “huge area in the middle” of readers of the Sun and readers of the Guardian.
Humphrys went onto make a thinly veiled prediction of failure, mentioning the that the New Day could be similar to the Independent which is set to close its print edition in March.
But Phillips denied the paper would be similar in stance to the Independent and its sister title, the i.
She said the New Day would differ by catering to the “mass” market and that Britain doesn’t “at the moment [have] a paper that allows people to make up their own opinion”.
The new paper, with a bright blue masthead, will operate without a website and aims to present positive news to make people “feel good”.
The New Day’s publisher said its launch had “nothing to do” with the imminent closure of the Independent as a print title.
The Independent and the Independent on Sunday newspapers are to close next month and go digital-only.