NEWS today that Trinity Mirror intend to turn the Liverpool Daily Post into a weekly title hasn't really surprised me.

What it does make me feel, however, is sad.

The smart money's been on the LDP, sister paper to The Liverpool Echo, going weekly for a while now, as anyone familiar with its drop in circulation in the last ABC figures will testify.

Trinity say that the new title has been given the working tite of just The Liverpool Post, although the daily aspect of its coverage will continue on an enhanced website.

The media pundits agree the writing was on the wall, with Roy Greenslade writing that "its sales have been slipping steadily away for years" while earlier this year Steve Dyson predicted that it would follow fellow Trinity title The Birmingham Post to going weekly.

Another move announced simultaneously has a more immediate impact on what we do at The Champion, after Trinity announced that both The Maghull and Aintree Star and The Bootle Times will be replaced by community newspapers published within the Tuesday edition of The Liverpool Echo.

If you live in Maghull, Bootle or Liverpool it's been a sad day, with the fate of three long-established Merseyside papers now confirmed. Given that newspapers are part of the fabric of the communities they cover and something their readers have often grown up with, the loss of any title is a blow to those they serve. Sadder still is that six editorial jobs will be lost as a result of all the changes, so it really hasn't been a great day for journalism in the north west.

But the biggest shame of all is this; that the news has been completely overshadowed by The Leveson Inquiry, which so far still hasn't managed to distinguish between private investigators and paparazzi working for a handful of national titles and scores of regional papers which need all the help they can get right now. I'm not defending some of the things described today, which ought to be treated as acts of criminality rather than corruption, but at the moment a poorly provincial press is suffering just by association.

The titles serving Liverpool and Birmingham and every other community up and down the country might be facing troubled times, but they are not News Of The World.

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