New Day newspaper to close on Friday, nine weeks after its launch

New national daily newspaper New Day is to close on Friday, just nine weeks after it was launched by Trinity Mirror.

The title hit newsstands at the end of February with a promotional print run of about two million copies and a £5 million TV ad campaign that ran with the strapline "Seize the New Day."

Trinity Mirror announced the "disappointing" closure on its website on Thursday, ahead of the group's AGM.

It initially sold for 25p and rose to 50p with the Independent's 'i' newspaper seen as its main competitor. The Independent closed its main newspaper in February after 30 years and went online only.

New Day was Britain's first new national paper in 30 years and was aimed at those who had "fallen out of love with newspapers".

Editor Alison Phillips posted a statement to the paper's Facebook page that paid tribute to its staff and said the paper has "tried everything."

"To have not given this a go was to mean we were content to stand on the pavement and watch the decline of British national newspapers hurtle past us. But we weren't. And we still aren't," she wrote."

Trinity Mirror chief executive Simon Fox told ITV News, the publication was launched "with every hope that it would succeed".

"Unfortunately it didn’t have the take-up that we wanted. We always said at the beginning we’d be financially disciplined about it and we didn’t have the readership we needed."

He added: "I don’t think we’d do anything differently we had a fantastic editorial team, brilliant editor, I thought the product was fantastic."

"Our hope was that if we came up with something different, fresh, optimistic, balanced, more upbeat we might be able to get people to change their behaviour but that’s a tough ask. And it turned out to be tougher than we hoped it would be."