These days good cheer for the print sector is rare but it must ultimately be good news that Richard Desmond has decided there are better things to do than be a press baron. Press barons aren’t a much admired breed but Desmond over his 17 years found ways to lower even a denuded brand.

He took a newspaper with a long history – once the biggest selling daily paper in the world – and turned it into an object of ridicule and pity. Perpetual front pages about Diana, the weather and more recently any mooted cure for dementia may have produced the required cashflow, but they also meant his paper was off the pace to a degree that readily invited parody.

With Brexit, the Express has been a fundamentalist voice of anti-EU hysteria. On issues such as immigration, integration and diversity its tone has been malignant and crude, befitting its refashioning as the house journal of Nigel Farage and Ukip.

Who can forget its disgrace over Madeleine McCann? It, and its sister paper the Daily Star, suggested her grieving parents may have been responsible for her death. The result: front page apologies and a libel settlement of £550,000.

And if the intention was to out-Mail the Mail, it never did. Because the Mail, even when it is behaving badly, has a level of sophistication – and crucially investment – that Desmond’s Express could and would not have reached with his highest ladder.

And now Trinity Mirror owns his stable: the daily, the Sunday Express, the Daily Star and the Daily Star Sunday, as well as the three celebrity magazines, OK!, New! and Star. A word to them: it would be hard to do worse. No doubt there will be consolidation and that might be painful. But have a care with the staff. There are talented journalists there who have desperately needed resources and leadership to compete but have spent 17 years on a fool’s errand. They deserve better, and so do their readers.

The link between phone hacking and declining sales

Well isn’t this a case of strange bedfellows? One minute the media is up in arms, resisting Leveson and all his works, but chiefly any suggestion that the government should play any meaningful role in navigating the fortunes of the press. The next there is palpable relief at the notion that Theresa May, with her inquiry into plight of the quality national and local press, could be the one to save us from the triple blight of changing tastes, apathy and Facebook.

The chief focus for May’s review would be the debilitating effect on the press of social media, but the fervent hope must be that whoever does the heavy lifting for the prime minister is able to view the whole landscape and can join the dots.

Just days before she announced her quest to save the British media, Mirror Group was forced to pay yet another fortune in phone-hacking compensation, this time to the actor and media standards campaigner Hugh Grant. These payouts now come more regularly than buses. The week before, the snooped-on recipient was the former Doctor Who and Broadchurch star David Tennant, who accepted substantial undisclosed damages from the publishers of the now defunct News of the World.

Whoever considers the current financial plight and sales trajectories of the popular press and the misdemeanours of the recent past should be able to see the link.

It may be that the bad smell engendered by phone hacking accelerated sales decline: who decently and knowingly opts with their purchases to be part of a criminal conspiracy? But what seems too little appreciated is the extent to which market decline caused phone hacking. The challenging economics changed everything about how news was gathered, especially for those whose stock in trade was and is sensation: celebrity, news as entertainment, life as soap opera.

During my time at the Mail on Sunday in the circulation-happy, advertising-plenty days of the late 80s and early 90s, we were able to expend time and money nailing those stories down. Week-or fortnight-long sojourns outside a single building for a picture or crucial fact were common. I once, before the advent of mobile phones, spent so long waiting outside the assumed Swedish address of an associate of Carlos the Jackal that the newsdesk rang local police thinking I had been discovered and assassinated.

And it wasn’t just us. All the newspapers that sought sensational material had the resources to unearth it in quantities sufficient to keep their readers happy and fulfil their brand expectations. But then, steadily and surely, the cold breeze of sales decline and of vigilant corporate governance, AKA accounts and bean counters, blew in. Readers were no less keen for the sensational material. Indeed, as celebrity became a staple diet, the appetite for papers full of it increased. But how to get those stories with smaller newsrooms and smaller budgets from declining circulation and dwindling ad revenue? Enter the cheap and not-so-cheerful shortcut solution: phone hacking.

It’s important for whoever undertakes the PM’s inquiry to uphold the need for ethics, but also to understand the direct relationship between budgets, reader brand expectations and editorial practices. If, as was conceded in court, former executives at Mirror Group “condoned, encouraged or actively turned a blind eye” to phone hacking, that probably had less to do with moral or ethical deficiency than with the requirement that they keep up with competitors with fatter pockets. A poorly resourced press won’t just produce poor papers, à la Desmond’s Express. It will also struggle to be an upright one.

Piers Morgan ripped up the breakfast TV rulebook
One waits to see if Piers Morgan leaving the sofa of Good Morning Britain – for a “break” – will have any discernable effect on our gross domestic product. To see how many viewers dawdled late to work because they needed to hang back and see what tabloid TV controversy he would ramp up next. Morgan makes many outlandish claims for himself, as if fed chutzpah through a drip. But when he said he had “basically ripped up the rulebook of breakfast TV”, he was right.

There is nothing much wrong with BBC Breakfast, despite Morgan’s bombastic tweets to the contrary (one imagines that Twitter hooliganism as an art form gives him something to talk about with his friend Donald Trump). It’s just that Morgan has raised the noisy bar with his alternative template. The sober seek sobriety from Breakfast News. Those wishing to see Morgan work each day towards the broadcast equivalent of an antisocial behaviour order have been able to do so on ITV.

This is healthy in many respects and recognisable to those of us who defined ourselves some years ago by whether we watched Noel Edmonds’s wholesome Swap Shop on Saturday morning BBC or the sugary, delinquent equivalent that was Chris Tarrant’s brash and bawdy Tiswas on ITV. Thus Morgan, with his stunts and relentless headline chasing, has in his own small way broadened viewer choice and performed something of a public service. Short of a daily cockfight, he’ll be hard to replace.

•This article was amended on 11 February to reflect reports that Piers Morgan’s absence from Good Morning Britain is temporary rather than permanent.