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Time to pay for the ’s sidebar of shame The success of Mail Online comes at a cost for the print version stephen glover
As someone who writes for the Daily Mail, I am constantly astonished by the number of people who believe that Mail Online is its digital incarnation.
It’s not true, I insist, sometimes quoting the opinion vouchsafed some years ago by the Mail’s then editor, Paul Dacre, that Mail Online is ‘a totally separate entity that has its own publisher, its own readership, different content and a very different world view’.
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The Daily Mail doesn’t boast what has been nicknamed the ‘sidebar of shame’, with its fascination for showbiz figures, and its photos of scantily-clad ladies with ‘peachy bottoms’ and glimpses of ‘side boob’.
In comparison with Mail Online, the Daily Mail seems high-minded and almost prim, although there is admittedly some overlap in content.
It’s no good. People won’t be persuaded. All right, they say, there may be some differences between the print and the online paper, but they’re essentially the same beast.
This widespread perception doubtless explains why the Mail has experienced such difficulty in building up its paid-for digital version, Mail Plus, which is a faithful replica of the print edition.
Why would people pay for something that they (wrongly, as is happens) believe they can get free on Mail Online?
Some, of course, do pay, and largely as a result of heavy discounting the readership of Mail Plus has grown in recent months. But it is still less than a fifth the size of the paper’s daily average print sale of around 800,000. At the Times and the Telegraph, in stark contrast, digital sales dwarf print circulation by a factor of about four.
Although it sells more print copies than any other British paper, the Mail’s circulation is roughly a third of what it was 20 years ago. Print sales are practically certain to go on declining because that is what is happening to newspapers everywhere.
The obvious danger for the Mail is that in ten years the circulation of the paper will have fallen further, while Mail Plus – on account of the effect of Mail Online – will be unable to make up the deficit.
In such a world, Mail Online would continue to be a commercial success, but the Daily Mail, and its culture and values, would be slowly shrivelling.
Maybe such an outcome is acceptable to Jonathan Rothermere (who with his family now owns all the shares in Daily Mail and General Trust). After all, Mail Online has been a phenomenal success, not just in Britain but in the United States and Australia.
Nor, despite the meretricious ‘sidebar of shame’, should one doubt the excellence of much of Mail Online’s reporting. Perhaps Rothermere would be perfectly happy if the website were the jewel in his crown in ten years’ time.
But there is another way – which is to make readers pay for Mail Online, and bring it subtly closer in tone and content to the Daily Mail. The immediate consequence would be a dramatic contraction of Mail Online’s audience, possibly by more than 90 per cent. But those who remained would pay, and Mail Online would no longer be dependent solely on advertising revenue.
One drawback to this idea (I should stress that these are my own thoughts, and I have no inside information) concerns America, where Mail Online is going great guns. It is among the top ten most visited media websites in that country, and over the past year its audience is reckoned to have increased by 14 per cent in what is obviously a vast market.
Making readers pay to read Mail Online in the US would probably be an act of self-destruction. Almost all of them would migrate to other free websites. Britain is a different proposition, not least because here Mail Online is inhibiting the growth of a paid-for digital Daily Mail
It should be possible, though, to keep Mail Online free in America while charging readers in the UK. Those in this country who tried to gain access to the free US version could probably be blocked. The Daily Mail would be protected.
Can anyone tell me what’s wrong with this idea?
Last month, I suggested that Geordie Greig was making a late run to be editor of the Sunday Times, though Ben Taylor, its deputy editor, remained the favourite.
Taylor has since been confirmed as editor, while Greig has been appointed editor-in-chief of the online Independent by his friend –and controlling shareholder –Evgeny Lebedev.
Greig, who is a leftist Tory, will have his work cut out since the online Indy is probably to the left of the Guardian
I also mentioned the rumour that Greig had been part of a consortium interested in buying the Daily Telegraph. If that story was true, he has evidently decided that there are other fish to fry.
But I believe the Barclay family does want to sell the Telegraph. My money is on the German publisher Axel Springer, which was pipped by the Barclays when they bought the paper in 2004.
FILM HARRY MOUNT BABYLON (18)
Babylon is supposed to show how morally corrupt Hollywood was in the 1920s and 1930s. Instead, it shows how out of touch modern Hollywood can be with the art of making good films.
At three hours and nine minutes, this is an appallingly self-indulgent, sprawling, baggy work by writer and director Damien Chazelle. It’s learnt none of the lessons – in glamour, wit, style and how to enthral an audience – that the best films have taught over the last century. Less is more, as the saying goes. More is much less, you’ll find, if you undergo the ordeal of a visit to Babylon
The film intends to expose the hypocrisy of Hollywood in the 1920s as the supposed ‘most magical place in the world’. That’s what the main character, Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt, still wonderfullooking at 59), calls it.
Conrad is a fading superstar, based on John Gilbert (1897-1936), Hollywood’s leading man whose career and life were cut short by the shift from silent movies to talkies, when Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer came out in 1927. The arrival of dialogue has already been told many