Gray Lady Down: Has the London Daily Mail Overtaken the NY Times?
“The Daily Mail has overtaken the New York Times to become the world’s most visited newspaper website, according to online tracking service Comscore,” the BBC claims. “The biggest increase in readers has been in the US — so how did this very British institution do it?”
There is something compellingly simple about MailOnline. No fancy site navigation, picture carousels or slideshows – just a front page with stories and pictures. Thousands of them.
The New York Times claims it is still the world’s most popular newspaper website, because the Mail figures include visits to sister sites.
But let that not detract from the British newspaper’s achievement in going from nowhere to 45.3 million unique visitors a month in just five years. What is its secret?
1. Celebrity news
MailOnline’s success in the United States has been partly built, most pundits agree, on celebrity gossip. It is a very different beast from its more strait-laced print sister, even though it shares a lot of content with it.
Celebrity journalist and author Jo Piazza believes it is much imitated by rival US-based gossip sites.
Speaking in frank terms, she says: “Until we started seeing this influx of gossip websites here in the United States, the media was very ass-kissy towards celebrities, whereas the Daily Mail has never done that.
Just as an aside, this has long been one of the greatest failings of the Los Angeles Times. It has Hollywood right in its backyard, and yet, perhaps because it’s so “ass-kissy towards celebrities” (when it isn’t really ass-kissy towards politicians), it can’t get out of its own way and run amok covering the endless Hieronymus Bosch tableaux outstretched before them, that’s begging for them to report on it, in a fun, breezy way.
In a way, the problem is even worse at its northeastern cousin, as William McGowan noted in his landmark 2010 deconstruction of the New York Times’ myriad woes, Gray Lady Down:
“The entire social and moral compass of the paper,” as the former Times art critic Hilton Kramer later said, was altered to conform to a liberal ethos infused with “the emancipatory ideologies of the 1960’s” and drawing no distinction between “media-induced notoriety and significant issues of public life.” The Times took on more and more lightness of being. It became preoccupied with pop-culture trivia and über urban trends, reported on with moral relativism and without intellectual rigor.
The change was met by disaffection and derision within the paper’s newsroom. Grace Gluek, who ran the culture desk for a while as replacement editor, was one of the disaffected, and famously once asked, “Who do I have to f*** to get out of this job?” Howard Kissel, the theater critic of the Daily News, said the new cultural pages reminded him of a middle-aged woman learning how to disco: “She put on a miniskirt and her varicose veins are showing.” Gerry Gold, a staff reporter, commented, “We do all these pieces on pop icons as if they are important artistes. In fact they are creations of the big record companies. Yet we try to intellectualize them.”
That last sentence dovetails well with the other reason why the London Daily Mail is blowing the doors off the Times, which not surprisingly, the BBC can’t fully articulate, because it’s one of their own institutional weaknesses: It’s having fun. As Mark Steyn said, nearly six years ago:
In London, the most competitive newspaper market in the world, papers thrive by encouraging distinctive controversial voices. In America, the average Gannett or other monodaily prefers a tone of self-regarding dullness. As my friend John O’Sullivan put it, “They neither offend nor delight” – as a matter of policy. Yes, they’re broadly “liberal,” but not in a lively virtuoso engaging way, only in a dreary J-school way. I think they’re missing the point here. They don’t realize that they do have competitors now, in new media. In 1978, having driven your print competitors out of business, you could afford to be a dull city newspaper. I don’t believe you can now.
Of course, it’s often the case that generating the appearance of having fun requires an enormous amount of hard work (just ask Fred Astaire, who sweated blood to make his dance routines appear effortless). But readers can sense a paper with an institutional sense of playfulness, versus one that’s attempting to Very Seriously Talk Down To Them From High Atop The Mountains. Which has long been the message from the Times, particularly since Pinch transformed it from a fairly reliable (Duranty aside) straightforward news source into such a personality-driven paper, one of the leitmotifs of McGowan’s book. And the sense that readers get from those personalities is that:
- Krugman hates everybody, particularly Occupy Wall Street, since they’re too stupid to realize how they got played by one of the ultimate One Percenters.
- Friedman wants to turn America into totalitarian China, as long as he gets to keep his mansion.
- Pinch blames all of modern America’s shortcomings on his generation’s failures. And we really must all consume less for the environment. But in the meantime, damn, that new Dylan CD sure sounds fantastic on the CL600′s sound system while cruising over to the Hamptons, doesn’t it?
- MoDo really needs a drink and a smoke. And maybe a kicky new pair of Manolo Blahniks.
In contrast, the New York Post is having loads of fun with its over-the-top-headlines. Matt Drudge brings a similar tone to his coverage. At the Wall Street Journal, James Taranto at least is having fun rounding up the biggest stories of the day, and deflating the pretensions of the “progressive” elite. Here at PJM, Steve Green, Roger Kimball, the mysterious Zombie, and Roger Simon, our Maximum Pajamahadeen, among others here, bring a welcome sense of humor to the grim news of the day. (As does Glenn Reynolds, who single-handedly seems to crank out more links daily than all of Pinch’s bloated enterprise.)
Oh, and one other reason why the Daily Mail is winning the newspaper war: it is willing to deflate the religious beliefs held most dear by the management and editorial bullpen of the New York Times.
As Peter Biskind wrote in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, when Robert Altman’s nimble, low-budget, no-name cast adaptation of Richard Hooker’s novel M*A*S*H overtook Mike Nichols’ leaden, spare-no-expense all-star version of Joseph Heller’s similarly-themed Catch-22 at the box office in 1970, Altman hung a sign in his office that said “CAUGHT-22.” The increasingly far left worldview that pervades the New York Times’ offices as badly as it does Mayor Bloomberg’s, has transformed it into a paper that’s full of Catch-22s, a newspaper far more concerned with ideological purity than actually reporting news that people want to read in a lively fashion. If the Daily Mail really has overtaken the Gray Lady’s Web traffic, all I’m left to ponder is, what took them so long?
The Times could have fun in their coverage, at least in the initial reporting and writing, but the “fun” would turn into something like what happened to Reuters with their Marco Rubio story last week.
In the wake of the demise of PM, the far left newspaper of the 1930s and 40s in New York that David Axlerod’s mom used to work for, there was constant pressure on the Times to become what they are today. But while the editors and publishers of the paper, including Punch, were liberal, they never gave into the idea of basically turning the Times into an advocacy journalism daily for their personal pet causes. If you were a dissident liberal writer who thought the Times should use it’s power to open push political positions on Page 1 and not the op-ed section, you went to the Village Voice, where concerns about fairness (and in many cases, accuracy) were secondary to getting your polemics out in the public. Twenty years into Pinch’s run, it’s hard to see how you put the genie back in the bottle without a complete change of ownership, because the one who think like he does (including, apparently, Abe Rosenthal’s son) are entrenched in the top echelons of the Times. Shaking them out would make the shrieking and rendering of garments when Rupert Murdoch bought the then-left-of-the-Times New York Post back in 1976 look like a minor fender-bender by comparison.
Plus the Daily Mail has it’s licentious Femail Today.
Gossip, scandal, T and A, weirdness and a dash of stupidity.
But people like to read gossip, scandal, T&A, and weirdness. Bury your head in the sand at your own risk.
John:
Rending, please, not rendering. Unless you write English for the NYT.
When you go full bore Code Red, why bother reading the NYT? You could just skip
the pretentions and proceed directly to the CPUSA news.
The NYT has declined due the quality of their product. I grew up with the NYT and will not miss it if it fails.
i mourned the death of the ny times several years ago when i noticed it was swirling down. it’s main theme these days is the fake news regarding israel and anything or anyone jewish. unless, of course, it is their token self-hating court jews, friedman and cohen. please i have to eat dinner.
there is no ny times. just the name, which must have been bought from the sulzberger family for quite a penny. nice.
It was the Daily Mail that mocked Sarah Palin for taking a hairdresser to Haiti when her hair was being brushed by her own daughter. Please don’t let the wheedling, triumphalist British press (Sullivan, Morgan, Bashear, etc.) get any more slavering encouragement from us.
Should have been Bashir. There’s another goon, in hockey, with a similar name.
Sullivan, Bashir, Morgan (no relation) – they’re all yours, now. You get to keep them. I read it in the rules somewhere.
Is this the Posh Spice Clause?
I used to buy the NY Post at the airport all the time. I would say “I’m cheating on the LA Times.” It was fun!
And speaking of Mayor Bloomberg, long past time someone reviewed the intellectual decline of Bloomberg Businessweek. The left wing slant there discredits the magazine.
Yes, Goldberg is going on about dog-whistles and racial code by evil conservatives while ignoring the fact that on the Left hate-speech needs no decoder ring.
From virtually every entity you can think of that is Left from the YWCA with its sponsorship of white privilege conferences and seminars, HuffPo with its hate speech by Dr. Boyce Watkins, MSNBC with that odious Nazi Melissa Harris-Perry and Al Sharpton, the Washington Post-owned The Root with its incessant and daily hate-speech, Obama’s own United Trinity Church, the NAACP, the Congressional Black Caucus, La Raza and so much more, the message is clear: white people are either deluded or purposeful racist and the lives of all minorities everywhere would be much better off if it weren’t for whites.
From crime to academic achievement to food stamps to IQ tests, any disparity is laid directly at the door of nameless and faceless white people in their millions. Screw Goldberg, he’s not reading his own partner’s works, preferring to obsess over “blah” and “food stamp President.” This type of racism exists, not by direct observation because that would discomfit blacks, but by inference. In this sense, cheap psychology trumps facts and Occam’s Razor is thrown in the trash.
This is politically correct, Critical Pedagogic liberalism where social and economic standing plus success or lack of it determine morality and crime.
Nudity
Yeah, they’re definitely the place to go to see that Emperor Obama has no clothes….
On the NYT Rosenthals: Sometimes the apple does fall far from the tree. Seems
the son is rebelling. I thought rebelling ended after you grew up. Feel sorry for
Abe.
And not only that but ‘The Guardian’ is on the verge of bankrupty as well. Next the BBC and then Hollywood.
BTW Excellent aticle in this weeks Economist about demographics of London. looks like we will getting more of this.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpress/article/ALeqM5isW-DqZE7tf7iVPmxwyE6Q8-Ou_g?docId=B20001491327580222A0000
Aren’t we the lucky ones!!
I started reading the Daily Mail about a year ago when I just couldn’t take another minute of fox. It’s pretty conservative (considering it’s a British newspaper) and I just love it! The Brits have been astounded that they’ve been mobbed by the Americans and Americans can’t believe they have to go to a British newspaper to find out what’s happning in their own country. I love the site and you also get to chat with the Brits. It’s fun!
And don’t forget the NY Times wants to CHARGE us to read this drivel! You think I’m gonna pay to read Krugman?
a newspaper far more concerned with ideological purity than actually reporting news that people want to read in a lively fashion.
Don’t forget the willful distortion and omission of context in the “factual” representation of that which the NYT doesn’t like.
Ah, The Post.
Maiden race at Saratogo and the reporter like two horses. Headline:
Super Pair in
Maiden Form
Worth A Look
And this recent gem:
Jewish groups were protesting using a menorah in a liquor ad. Headline:
Booze Ruse Screws Jews
Top those, Pinch.
I have been seeking out stories in foreign press for years about things that go on here in the USA that our lame stream media simply will not touch, the Mail’s success over the Times shows that I am not alone.
Compare and contrast hpow UK’s Daily Mail handled New York’s occupy squatters versus our own papers – that iconic photo of the occupooper crapping on an NYPD car came from the Daily Mail while our press was mostly praising the Obama endorsed parasites, even after it was abundantly clear to anyone paying attention that there was rampant criminal activity within that “movement”.
The Canadian Free Press is annother great Newspaper for us conservatives that show a positive view of America.
I check the Daily Mail website every day and so do quite a few people I know.
As far as journalism goes, it’s terrible. The website creates 100+ new stories every day, it’s “churnalism” at its worst. There are many “stories” that are literally a summary of a Youtube video and a link to it. Even many of the actual stories are hilariously sensationalized and unsophisticated. The other day there was a story about how terrible global warming is right next to one talking about how there’s no global warming but rather global cooling.
But the sheer amount of content from a very broad range of subjects, news from the UK and the US, sports, celebrities etc. makes it an entertaining stop in a time where we find ourselves browsing the internet out of boredom quite a lot- at home, at work, on a commute. I honestly believe that’s the secret of its success, it’s an aggregator for boredom relief.
Being “it’s an aggregator for boredom relief” is far better than causing it, which far too often, is precisely what ails the NYT.