Mail Men

by Adrian Addison

  The reason MailOnline has become a success is because we cover the waterfront. It’s all the news you need to know, all the news you wanna know. The big stories. The lighter stories. The completely amazing stories. You’re just competing for people’s time. So, I’m competing with people spending time on their Facebook page looking at pictures of their new niece when they could be looking at pictures of Kim Kardashian. What you have to decide is what you want your site to be, and make it as compelling and as sticky and engaging and interesting and fascinating – and as fun – as possible.26

  It is a far more direct and immediate relationship than that between a newspaper editor and his readers – Clarke has even referred to himself as being ‘like a DJ’ when he is editing the site’s homepage. Indeed, MailOnline fans can see the DJ updating the tunes in real-time; hang around for a few minutes and it’s sure to change. Again, unlike a newspaper, Clarke’s team know exactly how many people are reading each story; they know if a headline or a photo is working or not by checking how many people are actually reading it. They have the data, and the numbers are there to be read immediately. Journalistic instinct is what gets the story on the homepage in the first place but the clicks are what keep it there.

  ‘The thing about a digital product is, you’re not entirely in control of it,’ added Clarke.

  The readers are in control – the readers will very much get to decide what kind of a website it evolves into. But that’s a big leap that you have to make as an old print journalist into understanding digital. You have to kinda let go a bit and empower the readers and let them define your product rather than you saying ‘Right, this is what I – as an editor – think that the product needs to be and these are the stories I’m gonna print’ and, you know, you can kinda like it or lump it. In digital it’s a far more two-way interaction that goes on in real-time 24/7. We let the readers decide what they’re interested in, that’s why MailOnline is so sticky and why it’s so addictive and why people love it so much. It’s because we make sure that when you land on that page, the stories that you see first are the ones that we think you’re gonna read – and we know you’re gonna read them because we’re looking at what everyone in the last five minutes has read. And it’s a good bet that if everyone else has read stories one, two and three – then you’re probably gonna read stories one, two and three.27

  Just like Sunny Harmsworth almost 120 years before, Clarke grasped a central fact missed by the heavy newspapers of Harmsworth’s day: people don’t live in niches, it is actually possible to be interested in the political climate in Iran at the same time as looking at pictures of some celebrity’s cellulite.

  ‘We don’t think “we’re the professional journalists, that story is important – we’re gonna put it at the top” even if no one is reading it,’ Clarke said at ad:tech.

  That doesn’t mean you’re guided slavishly by the clicks and stuff floats to the top purely on whether it’s being used. Obviously, if there’s a big important story there that you think people should be reading and they’re not reading – then I always tell my people then, that’s our fault. If they’re not reading that story that they should be reading, it’s because you’ve sold it wrong – you’ve got the wrong headline, you’ve got the wrong picture. Or whatever. And we play around until, hopefully, we hit pay-dirt and we get a reaction from people.28

  These chats with his staff about hitting ‘pay-dirt’ are very much true to the Daily Mail management formula, as digital Mailman ‘Marlon’ told the author. ‘One day I was working on a story at a computer and Clarke sat down at the machine next to me. He just started growling and barking – calling everyone a cunt this, and a fucking cunt that. Then he settled down. So I finished the story I was working on but just kept typing at a screen because I really didn’t want to make eye contact with the man, in case it set him off again. But he knows what he wants for his site, and – you have to understand – it very much is his site. I was not aware of any editorial control whatsoever from above him. When I first joined I was told that so long as I got the photograph right, I’d do fine. And not to worry so much about the words – that Clarke didn’t care about the words.’29

  Martin Clarke is a Mailman with, wrote the Guardian’s media diarist Roy Greenslade, all ‘the man-management skills of a galley-master on a Greek trireme’30 – a trireme being a large warship with many oars that dominated the Mediterranean 2,500 years ago. It would prove to be an apt metaphor, as Clarke and his oarsmen would quickly come to dominate the clear blue digital waters between Britain, the USA, and Australia.

  A rainy little island off the west coast of Europe, though, was always going to be too small to contain the digital Daily Mail. There simply aren’t enough clicks in Britain to make a – free – newspaper website work, and, though the World Wide Web might have been invented by a Brit, it speaks American English. From the beginning of Martin Clarke’s operation, traffic grew in the States like a weed. Of MailOnline’s 5 million daily users in 2010, more than half were outside the UK, mostly in the US.31

  ‘When we first started MailOnline,’ explained Viscount Rothermere to the Newsworks’ Shift conference in 2013,

  we started seeing a lot of traffic from the US and we didn’t know how to monetise it so, it was a bit irritating to be honest with you in the beginning. We didn’t really want it. And, being unashamedly opportunistic . . . I remember reading an interview with [Guardian editor] Rusbridger and he was talking about making the Guardian ‘a global newspaper’ and I thought ‘actually, that’s a pretty cool idea’. So I started talking to Paul [Dacre] and Co. and said ‘Why don’t we follow the traffic? Why don’t we put some people into California – into LA?’ And that worked. Then they said we really want to be in New York, that’s the centre, that’s the place to be for news journalism. So we started building a team in New York. And it’s just continued to grow, we just followed our success if you like. It’s really that simple.32

  By the autumn of 2014, Rothermere had spent something like £35 million on the relaunched MailOnline and boosted traffic to 11 million users per day.33 Around two-thirds are now outside the UK, again mostly in the USA. Yet the States has, historically, been a tough market for any British press baron to enter; it’s a city-based newspaper culture rather than national – due to the sheer distances involved – and the start-up costs of launching a newspaper from scratch could put a spaceship into orbit. It’s a different tale with the Web because newspaper websites don’t need a big bang launch – they can work their way under American skin insidiously. And now British hacks – broadsheet as well as tabloid – are finding what they’d long suspected: they’re simply better at the journalism game than some of their heavier cousins on the other side of the Atlantic . . . and American readers, it would seem, agree. Paul Dacre spent six years working in the US in the 1970s and has firm opinions on the US newspaper industry.

  Is it a coincidence that America’s printed press – for years protected by its monopoly status, so pompously up itself, eschewing anything so tawdry as personality journalism that might actually sell papers – is now dying?34

  British journalists are great at connecting with real people inside their real homes about their real cares and their real concerns; the similarities far outweigh the differences, be they British homes, American or Australian. Physical distance means nothing online, the English-speaking world has become one market for news – though each territory does receive its own content created with essentially the same Mail formula.

  ‘People getting up in the morning in Sydney are already coming to MailOnline,’ said Clarke when the site started hiring Down Under:

  because people don’t really care where they get their news from so long as it’s the news that they want. Whereas in the past you had to buy the papers that were in your shop, and there was a limited number of papers in your shop, so you had to buy an Australian paper if you were an Australian person and a British paper if you were a British person. Online – you can go and
get your news from anyone in the world.35

  The New York Times was once the world’s biggest English-language online newspaper but MailOnline overtook the grey old lady in December 2011, with the Times’ management sniffily insisting that the Mail ’s mass market appeal, and taste in celebrity tittle-tattle, was not quite the same proposition.36 The Guardian’s online presence, however, is a direct competitor – and the Guardian also overtook the NY Times in 2014.37 The New York Times, though, did erect a paywall, which was always going to limit access as all walls are built to do.

  Media commentators on both sides of the pond have started calling this ‘the British invasion of news’, much like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones’ musical invasion of the early sixties, though not nearly as sexy. American digital firms, of course, have swamped the entire planet, and MSN, Google and Yahoo! are also now in the news game; these are the real competitors for free sites like MailOnline, not just other newspapers.

  A huge global draw for MailOnline is the infamous ‘sidebar of shame’ – a column of celebrity froth that runs down the right-hand side of that endless scroll. The sidebar of shame is basically content about ‘celebrities’ wearing clothes, performing the tricky task of walking through an airport or possibly news of one low-grade celebrity copulating with another. The first thing that hits a casual MailOnline reader is just how low the bar is to gain space. Unless a reader consumes this material regularly, it is populated by folk that they’ve probably never heard of.

  Martin Clarke doesn’t like the term ‘sidebar of shame’, preferring ‘right rail of fame’. As he explained to Mumbrella:

  Remember, the Daily Mail is not a red-top tabloid. We’re a middle market newspaper. Our copy is not sensationalist or the kind of stuff you’d see in The Sun or the Mirror.38

  Thirty seconds or so spent perusing the site itself would suggest otherwise. Vere Harmsworth, the third Lord Rothermere and the joint father of the modern Daily Mail, had resisted tearing down this path. It was not befitting of the Harmsworth family name. Even Paul Dacre himself has expressed contempt for these hollow, empty stars in a galaxy so full there’s barely any space left to shine out from. Inside the pages of his ‘journalistic primer’ the Sunday Express in his father’s day, famous faces always featured on page three.

  The lead article under the title ‘Meeting People’ was an interview – not with the kind of half-baked trollop who passes as a celebrity these days but with, say, the mother of a newly chosen British Nobel Prize winner.39

  It’s fair to say Kim Kardashian is unlikely to ever win a Nobel Prize, yet Kim is – at the moment – MailOnline’s number-one celebrity obsession; no Kim Kardashian picture story is too small for that scroll, and she often features several times a day, often using shots she takes herself and posts on social media. She might be kissing her husband Kanye West, landing at an airport . . . going shopping, adjusting her top, basically anything. Yet the Kardashian clan from which she sprang are not Dacre’s Mail types at all; they’re stars of a reality TV show mostly focused upon sisters Kim, Kourtney, and Khloé.

  The very concept of the Kardashians is enough to pop a billion blood vessels across Middle England; if the world is going to hell, as many British Daily Mail newspaper readers surely believe, then the Kardashians are whipping the rump of the digital dog that’s pulling the cart. Old-school Daily Mail readers aren’t, though, necessarily, MailOnline consumers, and there are very few clicks in the English shires. MailOnline does not express quite the same level of moral outrage as her 120-year-old sister, unless it is a story actually taken from the paper itself. Similarly, it does not resist the Kardashians and their ilk’s crunching of the family values that Dacre’s Daily Mail holds so dear. It is the readers of MailOnline – and countless purely gossip sites – that make folk like Kim Kardashian famous. The public put her there; it’s a simple fact that the daily life of a Nobel Prize winner will never be as interesting as Kim Kardashian’s.

  Digital Daily Mail readers are a different crowd to those who traditionally buy the newspaper. The core audience is young, slightly more female than male, well educated and well off. They dip in around twice a day and stay for about thirteen minutes a stop – on the phone on the way to work, then at their office desktop when they should be working – it has even been banned by one London trading room after the boss got fed up seeing his staff looking at MailOnline on their screens.40 Readers then stop by in the evening. It’s a day-long conversation between the reader and Clarke’s staff who are pulling hard on that scroll in real-time. It’d be a pretty dull conversation if MailOnline said the same thing all day. Many arrive via a Google search, aggregator or from a link sent via email to a friend which they clicked without knowing – or caring – where they were being led.

  ‘We’re quite good at converting those people who come via Facebook or whatever,’ said Clarke, ‘who then see some content down the right rail and get sucked in, and sucked in, and sucked in – and next thing you know, you’re bookmarked and they’re coming to you despite themselves.’41

  MailOnline can even track their moods in a way that is impossible for a newspaper. There’s a big difference in what people read ‘leaning forward’ in the day and what they read ‘leaning back’ in the evening; they are more playful and relaxed at night, preferring the lighter material, the features and gossip. This is where the big money is, as it provides the kind of information that is gold to editorial – and to advertisers. They can push different content to suit the mood, and readers may be relaxed enough to get out the credit card. As ever more people register their personal information, and as the site evolves, they will be able to target these people individually with content and products they know, for a fact, they like.

  Yet MailOnline consumers are not all gullible teenage girls who want to grow up to be Kim Kardashian. Meagan Hatcher-Mays, for example, is a registered lawyer in New York State and a legislative assistant in the House of Representatives . . . one never knows, she could be President one day. She’s also a contributor to Jezebel blog, where she wrote:

  I need to make an announcement regarding my credibility as a potential future professional woman and as a human being capable of empathy. I read the Daily Mail. Every single day. That feels good to say. I once admitted that I read the Daily Mail (or ‘DM’ as us regular readers call it) to a lawyer friend of mine, and she scoffed so hard I thought she broke her jaw. ‘Why don’t you just read The Independent?’ she scoffy scoff scoffed. Why don’t I read The Independent?! Who am I, some fancy prince? A wise little lord parading around in my tailcoat and cravat, filling my elegant mind with news of the day? No. No, ma’am. I AM A MONSTER. I’m admitting this to you now because I know I’m not the only one who suffers from this particular affliction. I want you fellow DM beasts to know you’re not alone. But guys, that website is awful and we should probably stop reading it. We have to stop reading it! I can’t stop reading it. Why can’t I stop reading it? I know I should be ashamed of my Daily Mail addiction, because that whole site is a shrine to everything that our dumb culture needs to deconstruct. But I’m not ashamed! Every decent freedom fighter worth their salt needs a break every now and again.42

  Louise Mensch is a former Tory MP who has attacked the paper for sexism and for trivializing prominent women, to which Dacre’s Daily Mail responded by saying her voice was ‘dental-drill shrill, shrieky enough to curdle a mobile blood bank’. She is, nevertheless, hooked on the paper’s website. ‘One of the reasons it’s so egregious is because it’s so readable,’ she told the New Yorker. ‘We’re clicking on “Oh my God, one of the WAGs couldn’t put her hair up because she’d freshly painted her nails” . . . and then you’re thinking, Why am I reading this? I’m an adult.’43

  The legion of MailOnline readers are right there on the page, leaving comments beneath every story; MailOnline receives over 120,000 comments every week. ‘They’re a surprisingly different group of people’ from the paper’s readers, says Lord Rothermere. ‘MailOnline is a muc
h younger audience and, of course, it’s a much more international audience. And their choice of stories is slightly different as well – and they expect things to be very immediate.’44

  Readers can’t, however, comment on Rothermere himself; it’s one of several words that’s automatically blocked. But most Americans don’t know, and don’t care, who Rothermere is. The Daily Mail has no legacy in the United States, as Stephen Colvin, a former CEO at Newsweek explained: ‘In the US, 95 per cent of the people who visit the website have no idea there is a newspaper associated with it.’ And Clarke sees that as a good thing. ‘Without a print product, you’ve got no legacy, no baggage. You can just be who you want to be.’45

  To help increase market recognition among the ad men of Madison Avenue, the Mail bought the dailymail.com domain name off the Charleston Daily Mail for a reported million dollars.46

  MailOnline’s future may be being driven by US consumers but it’s fair to say at least one stellar American isn’t a fan: George Clooney branded it ‘the worst kind of tabloid’47 in 2014 after extracting – and rejecting – an apology over ‘a completely fabricated story’ that he felt put his now wife Amal Alamuddin in real danger. As Clooney told USA Today:

  I’m, of course, used to the Daily Mail making up stories – they do it several times a week, and I don’t care . . . I accept the idea that freedom of speech can be an inconvenience to my private life from time to time.48

  Clooney was furious, though, when he read that his soon-to-be mother-in-law had told ‘half of Beirut’ that she opposed her daughter’s wedding on religious grounds because she is a member of Lebanon’s Druze community and ‘it says they joke about traditions in the Druze religion that end up with the death of the bride’.

  ‘Let me repeat that: the death of the bride,’ wrote Clooney.

  First of all, none of the story is factually true. Amal’s mother is not Druze. She has not been to Beirut since Amal and I have been dating, and she is in no way against the marriage – but none of that is the issue . . . The irresponsibility, in this day and age, to exploit religious differences where none exist, is at the very least negligent and more appropriately dangerous . . . The Daily Mail, more than any other organization that calls itself news, has proved time and time again that facts make no difference in the articles they make up. And when they put my family and my friends in harm’s way, they cross far beyond just a laughable tabloid and into the arena of inciting violence. They must be so very proud . . . they’ve exposed themselves as the worst kind of tabloid. One that makes up its facts to the detriment of its readers and to all the publications that blindly reprint them.49