www.curriculum-press.co.uk Number 177

The aims of this Factsheet are to consider the Daily Mail within the theoretical framework of media industries.

Daily Mail Production ProcessesThroughout the history of newspapers, technological developments have influenced the production processes. For example, in 1896 Harmsworth introduced new technologies into the production process. He raised revenue from carefully targeted marketing and developed national distribution on a larger scale than previously existed. The impact on the newspaper was seen in the way information was presented; the Daily Mail employed shorter bite-size boxes of information see in the magazine-style digests, such as Tit-Bits (1881). This meant that news was presented in shorter articles with clear headlines.

Case Study: The Daily Mail (Part 2)

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Activity: Take a closer look at the extracts from the Daily Mail’s first edition sold as ‘the penny daily for a half-pence’. The front cover was a combination of small-ads, which was the convention at the time. The editorial piece on motor cars versus the “smart trotting pony” reveals some of the paper’s institutional values at the time. All images can be found here: http://mhill46-holdthefrontpage.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/daily-mail-first-edition-1896.html

The early front page of Tit-Bits (1881) shows the use of shorter articles, compared to the typical newspaper of the time (see bottom right – the London paper The Evening News, 1881).

The frontpage of Daily Mail’s first edition, Monday 4th May 1896

The early FeMail section (left) and an editorial piece considering the virtues of the pony over the motorcar

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Technological developments allowed the Daily Mail to increase their volume of sales, and then offer an affordable cover price for the lower middle-class readership. The new layout appealed to this newly literate readership, but also to advertisers who provided a large chunk of the revenue. As the advertisements took a fair proportion of the space, the news content that arrived in the Daily Mail newsroom had to be internally edited to fit the space available. This gave way to a new single style and tone of news across the entire paper and led to the use of the Inverted Pyramid method (see below). This method, first developed as a result of the need to communicate quickly via telegrams, was used in newspapers as it offered effective communication of the product – the news. This increased the popularity of the paper, as the newly literate lower middle classes engaged with the new style of journalism. As a result, the Daily Mail are targeting specific social classes of readers, and this could be exploited by advertisers. And so, the relationship between advertisers and newspapers began. Advertisers would expect their financial investment to be well directed, and so newspapers had to shape layout and content of the paper to meet the perceived lifestyles and desires of the readers. The inverted pyramid calls on the reporter or editor to select the and prioritise key facts in descending order of importance meaning that the “the communicative quality of the texts improved considerably, making them more understandable” (Pöttker, 2003).

What is the Inverted Pyramid?This method can also be referred to as Front-Loading and means that you put your most important information first when constructing your news story. There are various benefits to this style of writing:

• Allows the reader to consume information quickly

• Front-loading each paragraph allows skim reading – it is easy to get a quick overview of the entire article

• Reader can identify quickly whether the article interests them in the opening paragraph

• The key information is conveyed early, so if the reader doesn’t finish the article they will leave with the reporter’s main point

• For online news, including the keywords in the opening sentences of the article boost the SEO (search engine optimisation) which ensures that the report is one of the first to appear on a web search.

However, this style of reporting can also throw up some problems or disadvantages:

• When your conclusion is front-loaded in the opening paragraph, information can be reductive and simplistic

• Readers may not fully understand complexities of a news event

• As a reader feels they have the key information, they may not read the full article

• Unlike the traditional narrative structure (beginning – middle – end) where the reader is rewarded with a conclusion, the inverted pyramid method can lead to an article petering out or running out of steam towards the end

• Misinformation or fake news is exploiting this method of reporting

• Often a headline will include the meme-ready share-worthy language encouraging clickbait or sharing of ‘news’ that is not read closely, if at all by the individual sharing it on social media.

The Daily Mail - Ownership The Daily Mail is owned by the British Media company DMGT (Daily Mail and General Trust plc) and “manages a balanced multinational portfolio of entrepreneurial companies, with total revenues of almost £1.5bn.” DMGT celebrates its links to the UK newspaper industry, and the Daily Mail brand online, which “attracts more readers around the world than any other English language newspaper website.” The company have also developed their B2B (business-to-business) information and from which they “derive more than half [their] revenues and two thirds of [their] profits.” This part of the DMGT business supplies “high-value data to the insurance, property, energy, education and finance sectors and operate highly successful large-scale events” (https://www.dmgt.com/about-us/our-companies). The company operates in over forty countries globally, with the head office in Kensington, London. The leadership includes Lord Rothermere (Jonathan Harmsworth) as the Chairman and controlling shareholder of DGMT. Harmsworth is the fourth generation of his family to hold this position.

The media subsidiary of DMGT is DMG Media (formerly Associated Newspapers). DMG Media publishes the following titles:

Daily Mail: The Daily Mail is the leading mid-market daily newspaper in the UK. Established in 1896 by Kennedy Jones, Harold and Alfred Harmsworth. It is edited by Fleet Street’s longest-serving editor, Paul Dacre.

Mail on Sunday: The Mail on Sunday is the UK’s second largest national Sunday newspaper. Edited by Geordie Greig, it is known for its investigative, exposé journalism and its lifestyle magazines You and Event.

MailOnline: MailOnline is the world’s largest newspaper website with more than 54 million monthly unique visitors globally. It is also America’s third biggest online newspaper with US traffic of 20 million monthly unique visitors and almost 2 million daily visits.

The Inverted Pyramid of Journalism

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Mail Plus: Mail Plus is an app available via subscription on Apple and Android tablets. It features all the content of the printed edition plus interactive features, games and puzzles.

Metro – an urban tabloid free newspaper distributed throughout many UK cities, Metro is the UK’s third largest print newspaper.

Metro.co.uk – popular UK online newspaper with a daily circulation of 1.6 million

Mail Today - a 48-page compact size newspaper launched in India on 16 November 2007 that is printed in Delhi, Gurgaon and Noida with a print run of 110,000 copies. Based around a subscription model, the newspaper has the same fonts and feel as the Daily Mail and was set up with investment from Associated Newspapers and editorial assistance from the Daily Mail newsroom.

DMG also own the following companies and services:

Mail Travel – Mail Travel started out as a Reader Offer department of the newspaper but has become a travel business offering holidays and cruises from over 20 suppliers. It relaunched its website in September 2014.

Wowcher – Wowcher launched in 2009 by Nick Brummitt and sold to DMGT in March 2011 and has since grown to become the UK’s second largest online vouchering website. The brand is focused on affluent, urban, young women.

Jobsite – Jobsite.co.uk is a UK’ recruitment site for engineers, IT/tech, finance, sales and admin roles. It reaches over 65% of the UK population; 26% of candidates use Jobsite exclusively.

This is Money – thisismoney.co.uk – provides consumer financial advice.

EditorPaul Dacre is the editor of the Daily Mail, as well as the editor-in-chief for DMG Media and a director of DMGT. Dacre is an extremely successful editor, with the Daily Mail winning the British Press Awards ‘Newspaper of the Year’ six times. Dacre has also been a member of the Press Complaints Commission (1999-2008) and has chaired the Editors’ Code of Practice Committee (2008-2016). Dacre was born in North London, where he grew up in the suburb of Enfield. He was the oldest of 5 children and son of journalist Peter Dacre. He attended the independent school University College School, having achieved a state scholarship, going on to read English at the University of Leeds. Whilst studying in Leeds, Dacre became involved in the university paper, Union News, eventually becoming its editor. As editor, Dacre supported liberal politics covering student sit-ins, gay rights and drug use. Also studying at Leeds during this time was Jack Straw (former Labour MP and Foreign Secretary), and Dacre wrote editorial pieces supporting Straw’s student sit-in protests. During his time as editor of Union News, Dacre introduced a pin-up section (Leeds Lovelies), instigated investigative pieces into the strip shows at local pubs, and achieved recognition from the Daily Mail after being named Student Newspaper of the Year. Dacre has said that “dull doesn’t sell newspapers” but rather that “sensation sells papers”. Dacre sees the success of editing a paper to be “firstly, the paper never, ever, forgot who its readers were and what interested them and their families. Secondly, it told everything through the prism of people.”

Dacre: Freedom of the Press…English Common Law is the collective wisdom of many different judges over the ages. The freedom of the press, I would argue, is far too important to be left to the somewhat desiccated values of a single judge [Justice David Eady] who clearly has an animus against the popular press and the right of people to freedom of expression… It is the others I care about: the crooks, the liars, the cheats, the rich and the corrupt sheltering behind a law of privacy being created by an unaccountable judge. If Gordon Brown wanted to force a privacy law, he would have to set out a bill, arguing his case in both Houses of Parliament, withstand public scrutiny and win a series of votes. Now, thanks to the wretched Human Rights Act, one judge with a subjective and highly relativist moral sense can do the same with a stroke of his pen.

Activity: Dacre’s ideological position. Read the extracts from a speech Paul Dacre delivered to the Society of Editors in November 2008. What can you conclude about his values and ideologies?

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All this has huge implications for newspapers and, I would argue, for society. Since time immemorial public shaming has been a vital element in defending the parameters of what are considered acceptable standards of social behaviour, helping ensure that citizens – rich and poor – adhere to them for the good of the greater community. For hundreds of years, the press has played a role in that process. It has the freedom to identify those who have offended public standards of decency – the very standards its readers believe in – and hold the transgressors up to public condemnation. If their readers don’t agree with the defence of such values, they would not buy those papers in such huge numbers. Put another way, if mass-circulation newspapers, which also devote considerable space to reporting and analysis of public affairs, don’t have the freedom to write about scandal, I doubt whether they will retain their mass circulations with the obvious worrying implications for the democratic process.

Dacre: The BBCThirdly, something must be done about my favourite bête noire: the ever-growing ubiquity of the BBC. For make no mistake, we are witnessing the seemingly inexorable growth of what is effectively a dominant state-sponsored news service. The corporation has all but seen off ITV’s news services, both nationally and locally, has crippled commercial radio, is distorting the free market for internet newspapers and now, with its preposterous proposal for 65 ultra-local websites, is going for the jugular of the local newspaper industry. Lines must be drawn in the sand.

In the Cudlipp memorial lecture I gave last year, I argued that, while I would die in a ditch to defend the need for a BBC, and while I myself would pay the full licence fee for Radio 4 alone, the Corporation is simply too big and too powerful. It is destroying media plurality in Britain and in its place imposing a liberal, leftish, mono culture that is destroying free and open debate in Britain… Indeed, I know that I have truly been sanctified by the Gods when the Chief Executive of the Guardian, the BBC’s traditional soul mate, in a blistering denunciation, attacks the BBC as “rampant”. “What chance,” she argues, “has the regional press got when they are developing websites and doing it amid structural change when the BBC can come in with £68 million?” And referring to the Corporation’s other incursions into the spheres of commercial radio and the internet, she declares “They are creeping everywhere and we don’t know where they are going to go next”.

Editorial Control – what is the influence of the editor?“News is not self-defining, it is not ‘found’ or ‘gathered’, but rather it is ‘made’. News is a creation of a journalistic process and therefore it is a commodity.” (Philo, 1980)

Dacre learnt early on that the way in which information is presented will impact on the circulation and revenue that it generates and has stated as much on various occasions. What it is important to consider, is the editorial control evident in the Daily Mail by owners and the influence of the editor, and in so doing we consider the effect of individual producers on media industries.

In the wake of the Brexit referendum result, Guardian journalist Tim Adams reconsidered the coverage of the Daily Mail from the point the referendum was announced, through the Leave and Remain campaigns, and in the lead up to the referendum vote. Adams noticed that the Daily Mail’s usual cover topics (the NHS and health tourism, political scandal, waste of foreign aid, terrorist threats) were superseded by the fear of mass immigration should Remain win.

‘Is the editor of the Daily Mail the most dangerous man in Britain?’, Tim Adams, The Guardian, 14 May 2017First there is a series of front pages about Britain’s “wide-open borders”. These stories are sparked by a coastguard’s interception of a boat of 18 Albanian asylum seekers off the coast at Dymchurch. It follows with the splash that the boat had been bought on eBay. The following day, by implication, we get an extrapolation of what this boat portends. The headline identifies “EU killers and rapists we’ve failed to deport” and details, in the manner of Trump and Mexico, that “thousands of violent thugs and rapists from the EU are walking Britain’s streets”, a number “equivalent to a small town” flooding in through Kent. The following week, we have our first view of Magwitch himself, Avni Metra, 54, who is surprised at his flat in Borehamwood in the proximity of a kitchen knife, and apparently wanted for murder two decades ago in Tirana. He is not alone: there is also the “one-legged Albanian double killer” Saliman Barci in Northolt. Though Albania and Kosovo (where the killers claim to come from) are not members of the EU, and it is not clear how leaving will do anything to prevent their arrival in Britain, the implication is clear. Cameron and his remainers are bringing a townful of knife-wielding Albanian murderers to the home counties. The 2,500 reader comments under this story speak with one voice: “Get them out now and get us out now!”

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Of the 23 weekdays before the referendum, the Mail led with this immigration narrative on 17 of them. One exception was the grim morning of 17 June when Jo Cox’s murder made the front page. Her killer, Thomas Mair, was not a one-legged Albanian. Mair was, of course, a violently extreme advocate of “Britain first”. The Mail appeared anxious to relegate his shouted rage against the perceived evils of multicultural Britain to a side-issue, however. He was, their report emphasised, just a “loner with a history of mental illness”. The following day it reported that the police were investigating primarily not Mair’s far-right links in the targeting of Jo Cox for her pro-immigration views, but failures in the social services that led to his depression going untreated. (The Mail subsequently, in November, shamefully, reported news of Mair’s conviction for the only murder of a sitting MP this century on page 29 of the paper, making the case that his motivation appeared to be that “he feared losing his council house to an immigrant family”).

In all these months, if you read only the Mail, that idea of “people” against whom all these unpatriotic forces were ranged appears to get narrower and narrower. They are essentially and always, “people like us”. One of the most telling insights in Andrew Addison’s book answers the question of how almost everyone in the Mail’s feature pages tends to look the same.

A former editor on the paper’s Femail section who goes under the pseudonym “Penny” told the author: “[All the women] have to look good in a wrap dress and be a certain size. Every story – with the very occasional exception – has to adhere to this 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 going to work. The makeup artist and hair – they’re enormous budgets – are being sent every day, several times a day, to several stories, you know, ‘ju-jing’ people up. And that ethos, for sure, stems from Paul Dacre; this story will only be meaningful if he thinks it [affects] ‘someone like us’.”

It must have seemed a gift to Dacre that the prime minister of his choosing fitted that Femail template so convincingly. Theresa May might have shown the “steel of the new iron lady” when she triggered article 50 in the new year, but she was also the kind of Femail the dominant Mail most admired: “Never mind Brexit – who won Legs-it?” it asked of its people about May’s “pins” in March.

By this point, by the time the negotiations had begun, and just before the election was called, a year that seemed to have been dictated from a Daily Mail script had found a predictable ending. James Slack, the paper’s political editor, who had been at Dacre’s right hand as he constructed his narrative – beginning last February with the challenge to Cameron, and in the vanguard of the coverage of immigration and the routing of the Bremoaners – was imported to the prime minister’s team as official spokesman, her very own Alastair Campbell.

If anything, perhaps not surprisingly, the rhetoric from Downing Street going into the general election now sounds almost indistinguishable from the Daily Mail editorials that preceded it. There would be a “triple lock on Brexit to stop obstruction by diehard Remoaners”. May would characterise herself as a “bloody difficult woman” in facing up to the EU. Meanwhile, the Crushing of Cameron prefigured the “Crushing of the saboteurs” (You have to admire at least the attention to detail in this headline, Dacre finding an imported French word to characterise his enemy.) The “illiberal elite” is on the march.

Observation suggests that as people age, they tend to become more like themselves. Dacre is 68. If the past year is anything to go by, he and his paper seem to be becoming more Dacre-like with each passing month. He first took the helm of the Mail during the ERM crisis in 1992. At the time, Vere Harmsworth, then proprietor of the paper, told the Financial Times: “I am quite clearly in favour of a common market but I am not in favour of a federal Europe. Nor is the Daily Mail.” He added that perhaps his new editor did not share that distinction and occasionally went too far. “Sometimes I think Paul would like to tow England out into the middle of the Atlantic,” he observed. Twenty-five years on, the moorings are being released, and Dacre appears ready to set sail.

Activity: Consider the above extract from Adams’ article. What influence do you think Dacre has on the values of the Daily Mail? Are there any problems or issues with this? Read Factsheet 171 ‘Power and Industries’ and consider Dacre in the context of Curran and Seaton’s ideas.

Acknowledgements: This Media Factsheet was researched and written by Katrina Calvert and published in April 2018 by Curriculum Press. Media Studies Factsheets may be copied free of charge by teaching staff or students, provided that their school is a registered subscriber. No part of these Factsheets may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any other form or by any other means, without the prior permission of the publisher. ISSN 1351-5136