Mail Men

by Adrian Addison

  Clooney, alongside a handful of truly global A-list stars, has transcended any real need for the tabloid or gossip press and can somehow get in and out of an airport without being photographed. There are also still plenty of actors, musicians and other artists who just happen to be famous because they are really rather good at what they do – and have never courted this kind of low-grade fame. For the true A-listers the rules of the game change. A Clooney is a very different creation from a Kardashian.

  ‘We made a big error,’ Martin Clarke told the FT, adding, ‘Our best readers are celebrities. They love the pictures of themselves. I’m not hobnobbing with celebrities every day, but when I do run into people like the Kardashians, they adore what we do.’50

  Another criticism of MailOnline comes from within the trade itself: other journalists are often highly critical about where the website finds those 1,000 stories a day and 10,000 photos. MailOnline, Rupert Murdoch told the Leveson inquiry into the Press, ‘just steals . . . they steal gossip from everybody. It’s a great sort of gossip site – or bad, whichever way you look at it – and comes right up to the barrier of what is fair use of other people’s material.’51

  MailOnline resisted these accusations and even launched legal proceedings in 2015 against former employee James King and the – now defunct – Gawker website for claiming its ‘editorial model depends on little more than dishonesty, theft of copyrighted material and sensationalism so absurd that it crosses into fabrication’ and that the Mail takes a ‘buccaneering approach to accuracy and intellectual property’.52

  In the end, the case settled with no money changing hands and with the article remaining on the website untouched, followed by a lengthy Daily Mail rebuttal below it. The rebuttal begins with a similar stipulation to the above that ‘We utterly refute James King’s claim that DailyMail.com depends on “dishonesty, theft of copyright material”, and the publication of material we “know to be inaccurate”.’53

  Internal rules have been tightened in recent years, yet one freelance, Martin Fletcher, complained as recently as April 2016 to the Guardian media commentator Roy Greenslade after his Times story about the desecration of British war graves in Iraq was ‘repackaged’ by MailOnline. Fletcher had even funded the expensive trip to Iraq himself. The Mail later paid him for his work ‘with no admission of liability’.

  I’ve had a huge response from numerous fellow journalists whose work has been likewise abused by MailOnline . . . I am incensed by MailOnline’s dishonesty and its debasement of honest journalism.54

  Yet the Daily Mail newspaper once had probably the best reputation in Fleet Street for the fees it paid and the speed with which it paid them. Even the kill fees – cash for a commissioned story that never made it into print – were often better than the fees paid by other papers for stories they used. Even old hands such as David English’s first hire for the reborn Daily Mail, photographer Mickey Brennan, have had issues with MailOnline. ‘They used a picture of mine I’d taken when I’d first got to New York of P. G. Wodehouse when he was knighted by the Queen and the website used it huge without any accreditation,’ he told the author. ‘And I came across it and went fucking mad. Actually I contacted Dacre and eventually I got a couple of hundred quid out of it but I was fucking furious about it – they’re a bunch of thieves.’55

  Inside MailOnline newsrooms in London, New York, Los Angeles and Sydney there are battalions of MailOnline staff whose entire job it is to collate such stories, any dreams from their student days of a journalist of the year award or a Pulitzer prize surely fading with every pull on the oar that propels Martin Clarke’s digital trireme.

  The Daily Mail ’s digital whelps are part scavenger, part sub-editor and headline writer, part reporter and picture taster, part adman, and they’re often a whizz with Photoshop and video too. They’re also part celebrity-magazine gossip writer; it’s a vital skill to be able to spot a Kardashian in a crowd. At a team briefing in 2010, when MailOnline had risen to become the most popular newspaper website in the UK with almost 18 million readers a month – a 446 per cent audience growth in three years – Clarke told his staff: ‘This shows that, firstly, I am a fucking genius, and secondly, that you are all doing really well.’56

  As of summer 2016, MailOnline employs over 800 people – around half of them journalists (and around half the total staff work overseas, mostly in the US).57 Just like the readers, it’s a different breed to those employed by the paper. ‘They’re younger,’ a then forty-eight-year-old Martin Clarke told the ad:tech conference in November 2012.

  And have different attitudes and outlooks, which is healthy. But we have some old people, I’m not the oldest person who works in our outfit: nearly, but not quite. But obviously it’s younger and I don’t think it’s a bad thing for that . . . The opportunities for young journalists are digital. Any young journalist who doesn’t want to master this medium is nuts.58

  This new breed is generally better educated than hacks have ever been, yet they often forget a verb or the definite article and sometimes seem to apply grammar taken from a language where everybody converses in ‘txt msgs’. Raw copy, though, has always been full of typos and mangled grammar; that’s partly why sub-editors exist. But things move too fast now for ponderous ranks of subs to clean up that snowstorm of words and pictures. Routine checks and attempting to get a response from the subject of a story – the very basics of journalism to which Dacre’s Daily Mail newspaper most certainly subscribes – are also lacking at MailOnline, said Dominic Ponsford, editor of Press Gazette. ‘I don’t think it’s particularly in the culture of the people there to be making phone calls and doing extra checks,’ he told the Guardian. ‘Most people’s job is to repackage stuff.’59

  Working for MailOnline, a former staffer told the (Murdochowned, therefore a competitor) Wall Street Journal, was like ‘Hoovering up the Internet and vomiting it back out’.60 Clarke’s former boss, and former top Femail, Sue Douglas, doesn’t think much of the site’s content either. ‘There is no real journalism in there [within MailOnline], is there? It’s just Hello! magazine writ large. Digitally. It’s about celebrity culture. It’s about fame . . . and that’s about it. You go into a newsroom these days and all you can hear is the sound of keys clicking on a keyboard. It’s all just so deadly quiet, it’s like working in a bloody bank. You don’t become a hack to work in a fucking bank, do you? In the old days you’d be writing and somehow you’d have to close off what was going on around you without sticking your fingers in your ears. People would be talking and shouting, and on the phone. Now, all these kids are doing is looking things up on the Internet. In total silence.’61

  Irrespective of any criticisms, Clarke’s formula for the newest incarnation of the Daily Mail is working and, like English, he likes to throw a party to celebrate the site’s successes. He even hired a yacht in the early summer of 2015 (and again in 2016) on the French Riviera, the holiday destination of choice for the Victorian-era Harmsworths, for celebrities and admen. George Clooney, presumably, wasn’t invited to the Mail ’s Cannes Lions Festival bash: that’s the festival for the admen, not the invitation-only A-lister Cannes Film Festival the previous month (George and Amal Clooney did actually attend that one).

  The party predictably got a mention on the MailOnline scroll with twenty-four pictures, and a couple of videos. Pregnant Kim Kardashian was there, of course, number one on the guest list.

  The stunning star wowed . . . in a sheer black outfit that left little to the imagination . . . the beauty made sure all eyes were on her as she arrived fashionably late . . . showing off her shapely figure in her daring attire . . . figure-hugging and almost dangerously sheer . . . she looked amazing . . . curvy Kim . . . revealed her undergarments worn to protect her ample cleavage and shapely bottom half . . . her perfectly applied make-up accentuated her eyes, lined in black to give her the advantage of a striking gaze . . . her long dark brunette locks were worn down for the occasion, a long and glossy waterfall down her back and
over her shoulders . . . Kim finished off her eye-catching attire with a pair of classic black strappy sandal heels . . . The fashion-loving businesswoman and TV favourite . . .62

  A reader would need a toffee hammer to break off all the sugar-coating and actually find a living woman inside. This Kim ‘scoop’ was written by Lucy Mapstone, MailOnline’s assistant showbusiness editor at the time, a ‘showbiz and fashion enthusiast, online editor and journalist with a passion for excellent copy, speedy coverage, glossy images and the permanent scroll of on-going news’.63 Although unaccompanied by flowery description, MailOnline even published snaps of a rather grumpy-looking Englishman outdoors struggling in the sunlight called ‘Martin Clarke’,64 without wearing his – once obligatory for all the world’s Mailmen – tie.

  Desired. Demanded. Devoured. Declared the MailOnline branding at the same yacht party; the future of news, says Clarke, is all about brands: big brands such as CNN, MSN and Facebook. As of July 2016, MailOnline’s daily number of readers is around 15 million.65 The Mail has a long way to go yet to catch the biggest British player; the BBC has a weekly global audience of 348 million66 (and, of course, is underwritten by a tax on TVs so has no existential requirement to turn a profit67): ‘There are going to end up being four or five big global news brands,’ Clarke told the Financial Times. ‘We need to be one of them, we’re going to be one of them.’68

  The digital Daily Mail isn’t just competing with newspapers; its competition is the internet itself. It’s free to the user, so it needs enough eyeballs to make it pay – or, more precisely, to make advertisers pay; nothing new there, independent television has done this from the start and plenty of free sheets (including Associated’s own Metro) make a tidy profit with no cover price. MailOnline is Associated Newspapers’ future, as is, it seems – internally – Martin Clarke.

  ‘As a journalist, it’s much more fun to be part of a company that’s growing than one that is constantly re-trenching and shrinking. Much more fun,’69 he added. ‘What I’m proudest of about MailOnline is that it insures us as a newspaper against the future.’70

  17

  People Like Us

  The future of the Daily Mail brand may well have been all but secured by its flourishing digital sister, but MailOnline is a scroll that exists only on screens, and the newspaper remains very much king at Associated Newspapers. Editor-in-chief Paul Dacre still constructs an actual physical newspaper every weekday night, a task he has often referred to as being similar to that of ‘a conductor’. So most evenings this conductor, this tyrant, strides out of his office trailing deputy and assistant editors in his wake, arrives at his back bench and taps his baton upon his lectern, then warms up the show with a ‘cunt’ or two.

  ‘I have a very considerable orchestra of talents and the Daily Mail is the representation of the broad views of some very, very clever journalists and executives and their consensus, and their views,’ he told the BBC, adding, ‘Yes, [there is] lots of shouting because shouting creates energy, energy creates great headlines – great headlines married with great pictures, great pictures sublimate great words . . . imagine the joy of putting together 96 pages from nothing.’1

  Dacre’s Daily Mail has all the latest technology money can buy, yet it is built by hand the old-fashioned way just like in Sunny Harmsworth’s day, with everything printed out for Dacre and his senior team to edit on paper. It’s a tactile, visceral thing to make a Daily Mail, with the tyrant Paul Dacre tearing into every page with his pencil. ‘He does get so, so angry sometimes,’ said former Mailman ‘Marc’, who was often on the edges of the back bench. ‘I was always slightly disappointed I didn’t receive one of his famous “double cuntings” – where he’d manage to call you a “cunt” twice in one sentence as he’s putting the paper together.’2

  As edition time approaches fast, the editorial floor is abuzz with senior Mailmen dashing about clutching scratched and torn bits of paper, articles that Dacre and his top aides have demanded be changed as they force life into the Mail monster through words and pictures.

  ‘Stories are given back to you with all sorts of marks and comments on them – it’s like having your bloody homework marked,’ sighed ‘Mo’. ‘They write things like: “what a load of old waffle” and “for fuck’s sake I have lost the will to live” . . . and the stupid thing is that the editors all contradict each other. One will tell you to take a section out while another tells you to move it higher up the copy and make more of it. Trying to decipher it all is a nightmare. Dacre oversees and approves every headline and deck on every feature and Femail story. He cares less about news. The agonizing that goes into the Daily Mail ’s poncy headlines you would not believe.’3

  Dacre spends most of the day in his office and strides out on to the floor at 7 p.m. or so, deciding on what is going to make it into his paper and what is going to be binned; rewriting copy, mainly the intros, and writing and approving headlines; making the pieces of the jigsaw fit together. It can be a hot and noisy, stressful place to be for all those concerned.

  ‘He can be very shouty and abusive but other times he can be quite jovial,’ said ‘Ian’. ‘He can be very funny and dry when the mood takes him. One of the subs is a lesbian which he is fascinated by and he’s always trying to engage her in conversation about her life – she and her partner have children.’4

  Most of the poor plebs out on the floor, however – the toiling sub-editors and the reporters and the junior desk men – have very little contact with the supreme Mail being when he is out on the floor conducting his orchestra; which is very different to the early days of David English, when the boyish editor seemed to know everybody. Dacre’s Daily Mail is all about hierarchy and structures, say staff – it’s simply not the done thing for more junior staff to talk to their editor.

  ‘Dacre was hardly ever on the editorial floor during the day and in all my years there I never saw him once talking to a [junior] reporter,’ said ‘Cyn’. ‘He never spoke to me directly once, and I was there for years. His behaviour causes so much insecurity at the Mail. I used to describe it to my friends as a “hideous den of whispers”. Everyone would just whisper to each other, all so terribly insecure. The atmosphere was so tense on the floor. It was thick with fear.’5

  There was some good news for Dacre one evening in June 2007 when he could finally lay out a newspaper declaring the departure of Tony and Cherie Blair. His Comment page summed up the Mail ’s position on the Blair years in a few killer paragraphs: ‘Snapshot of Britain on Blair’s last day’.

  History will remember Tony Blair as the most accomplished actor-politician of modern times – the man who made Labour electable after 18 years and went on to win three victories in a row. Nothing can take that (or the Northern Ireland settlement) away from him. But he will also be remembered as the Prime Minister who squandered all his opportunities and brought the governance of Britain – through breathtaking incompetence, spin and deceit – into disarray and disrepute. Abroad, in vast areas of the globe, our reputation lies in tatters.6

  A day later, and Gordon Brown was moving into No. 10, with a full-page photo on the Mail ’s front page and Dacre no doubt enjoyed signing off a headline that read: ‘Bye, Tony. Missing you already.’7 Dacre had long admired the new PM, telling the British Journalism Review in 2002:

  I disagree with a lot of what he says, but I think he is a genuinely good man; he’s a compassionate man with strong socialist principles and I think he’s an original thinker and a man of enormous willpower and courage.8

  Peter Mandelson, the former Labour Cabinet minister, also witnessed the surprisingly close relationship between the Mail editor and Brown when they all had dinner together early in the Blair years: ‘Dacre was Gordon’s favourite journalist and newspaper editor – quite how they were able to conjure up such warmth – hahaha – I don’t know, but they did.’9 Dacre, it seems, felt Gordon Brown was ‘one of us’ – possibly the single most important compliment from the Daily Mail.

  Not ever
yone who has appeared in the Mail during Dacre’s tenure turned out to be ‘one of us’ in a Daily Mail sense, though, often much to Dacre’s chagrin. Sometimes a member of the public – a civilian not party to the press game and not insulated by PR people – stumbles blindly into those carefully constructed pages. Each evening, Dacre and his top team shuffle through a heap of photographs on the back bench and choose which is best to illustrate the tale in that evening’s template . . . around the space taken up by the adverts. These civilians have to look the part that the Mail has assigned for them . . . which can lead to an uncomfortable conversation when a Femail has to inform them that their clothes are, well, not quite middle class enough for the newspaper. Orders are dispatched for a new set from Daily Mail central casting.

  ‘It’s all about “people like us”,’ former Femail ‘Penny’ told the author. ‘And they have to look good in a wrap dress and be a certain size. Every story – with the very occasional exception – has to adhere to a template. So that, no matter how good the story is, if the person doesn’t look like they might be a Daily Mail reader – it’s never gonna work. So you either have to be able to make them look like one or forget it.’10