Daily Mail and Mail Online CSP: Blog tasks

Daily Mail and Mail Online analysis 

Use your own purchased copy or our scanned copy of the Brexit edition from January 2020 plus the notable front pages above to answer the following questions - bullet points/note form is fine.

1) What are the most significant front page headlines seen in the Daily Mail in recent years?

2) Ideology and audience: What ideologies are present in the Daily Mail? Is the audience positioned to respond to stories in a certain way?

3) How do the Daily Mail stories you have studied reflect British culture and society?

Now visit Mail Online and look at a few stories before answering these questions:

1) What are the top five stories? Are they examples of soft news or hard news? Are there any examples of ‘clickbait’ can you find?

2) To what extent do the stories you have found on MailOnline reflect the values and ideologies of the Daily Mail newspaper?

3) Think about audience appeal and gratifications: why is MailOnline the most-read English language newspaper website in the world? How does it keep you on the site?

Factsheet 175 - Case Study: The Daily Mail (Part 1)

Read Media Factsheet 175: Case Study: The Daily Mail (Part 1) and complete the following questions/tasks. Our Media Factsheet archive is on the Media Shared drive: M:\Resources\A Level\Media Factsheets or online here (you'll need your Greenford Google login).

1) What news content generally features in the Daily Mail?

The Daily Mail is a national tabloid middle market daily paper in the UK. This means that the paper includes a combination of serious journalism and entertainment, occupying the middle ground between broadsheets that cover hard news (The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian) and the more down-market sensationalist tabloid papers (The Sun, The Mirror).

2) What is the Daily Mail’s mode of address? 

To understand how the Daily Mail address their readership, we need to know who the dominant readership is. From the NRS data, we can see that the dominant readership for the Daily Mail are adults aged 65+, in the demographic group ABC1(C2).

3) What techniques of persuasion does the Daily Mail use to attract and retain readers?

As newspaper print circulation has decreased in the wake of digital media, it is vital that institutions maintain readership figures to maintain revenue streams (cover price/ advertising/ sponsorships). A method used by the Daily Mail is the use of techniques of persuasion to establish a consensus in line with the political and social ideologies. These techniques are subtle and will attempt to stir the emotions of the consumer to prompt consensus. These techniques are split into 3 areas: Practical, Emotional, Associations.

Practical techniques include: bribery (offering rewards/ coupons/ incentives); newness (being new, or new and improved); longevity (reminding consumers of their childhood/ or the longevity of a brand to evoke nostalgia and trust); ease of use (offering a simple solution to a

complex problem); inexpensive (offering a product at a low price compared to competitors); luxury (offering consumers a chance to feel rich with abundant content). Emotional techniques include: exaggeration or hyperbole (taking a fact or statistic and blowing it out of proportion); repetition (repeated lines/ ideas/ themes to reinforces an idea); comforting (offering consumers a ‘fuzzy warm’ feel – this could be from the human-interest news, images, nostalgia); fear (warning consumers of the danger to their way of life/ family values/ financial security); humour (often at the expensive of those in conflict with the ideologies of the news institution – readers like a product that makes them feel good or echoes their dislike through the use of humour or satire). Associations include: celebrity endorsement; experts (having an expert to appeal to the logical brain helps to convince consumers).

4) What is the Daily Mail’s editorial stance?

5) Read this brilliant YouGov article on British newspapers and their political stance. Where does the Daily Mail fit in the overall picture of UK newspapers? 

Factsheet 177 - Case Study: The Daily Mail (Part 2)

Now read Media Factsheet 177: Case Study: The Daily Mail (Part 2) and complete the following questions/tasks. Our Media Factsheet archive is on the Media Shared drive: M:\Resources\A Level\Media Factsheets or online here (you'll need your Greenford Google login).

1) How did the launch of the Daily Mail change the UK newspaper industry?

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).

2) What company owns the Daily Mail? What other newspapers, websites and brands do they own?

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”. 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.

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.

3) Between 1992 and 2018 the Daily Mail editor was Paul Dacre. What is Dacre’s ideological position and his view on the BBC?

"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.

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."

4) Why did Guardian journalist Tim Adams describe Dacre as the most dangerous man in Britain? What example stories does Adams refer to?

First 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.

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”).

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.

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.

5) How does the Daily Mail cover the issue of immigration? What representations are created in this coverage?

First 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!"

Factsheet 182 - Case Study: The Daily Mail (Part 3) Industrial Context

Finally, read Media Factsheet 182 - Case Study: The Daily Mail (Part 3) Industrial Context and complete the following questions/tasks. Our Media Factsheet archive is on the Media Shared drive: M:\Resources\A Level\Media Factsheets or online here (you'll need your Greenford Google login).

1) What do Curran and Seaton suggest regarding the newspaper industry and society?

2) What does the factsheet suggest regarding newspaper ownership and influence over society?

3) Why did the Daily Mail invest heavily in developing MailOnline in the 2000s?

4) How does MailOnline reflect the idea of newspapers ‘as conversation’?

5) How many stories and pictures are published on MailOnline?

6) How does original MailOnline editor Martin Clarke explain the success of the website?

7) How is the priority for stories on the homepage established on MailOnline?

8) What is your view of ‘clicks’ driving the news agenda? Should we be worried that readers are now ‘in control of digital content’?