John McLellan comment: Trinity swoop on Northern & Shell could be resolved rapidly

John McLellan is director of the Scottish Newspaper Society. Picture: Contributed

The Competition and Markets Authority announcement that the Trinity Mirror acquisition of Daily Express publisher Northern & Shell raises 'public interest considerations' feels like a throwback to the 1980s and a time when social media, live streaming and mobile technology were the stuff of science fiction.

With the migration of so much advertising content to social media platforms – 90 per cent of all new business is being snapped up by Google and Facebook alone – the issue in commercial terms is not whether the Daily Mirror-Daily Express link distorts the advertising markets but how effective competition can be mounted against the social media giants. The Northern & Shell portfolio also includes magazines like OK, but again that is unlikely to make much difference in competitive terms when the real battleground has moved away from the newsstands.

The only other possible impediment would be the impact on breadth of opinion in the news market, but Trinity has already said that there are no plans to dictate a different editorial policy to the paper’s traditional right-of-centre position. In the interests of increasing commercial market reach, it wouldn’t be in its interests to do so.