If you want to see the future of online news and entertainment, look at the Mail and see a future neither the Mail nor its enemies want.
If Labour is not in power after the general election, you will hear many leftists blaming the Mail for their defeat. For more than a century, they say, it has pumped out thuggish attacks against every prominent liberal and leftist, and injected its particular venom—a paranoid poison—into wider debate. To its conservative readers, by contrast, the Mail is their shield against a world that would ignore their wishes, take their money and laugh at their convictions.
But it won’t be either a thug or a shield for much longer. As traditional newspaper readers die out, online journalism is the future. MailOnline is the most visited “news” site in the English-speaking world. Go there, however, and you will struggle to find the propaganda that drives the Left wild. There is no section at the top of its front page marked “opinion” or “comment” for readers who want conservative argument. Run your cursor past “News”, “Sport”, “TV & Showbiz”, “Fashion”, “Promos”, “Femail”, and—this must hurt—“Australia”, and finally at the far end of a list of 24 sections you will reach a tag marked “columnists”. Click on it and you find sports columnists, financial columnists and gossip columnists. Buried among them—like mossy tombs in a Victorian graveyard—are the remains of the right-wing pundits whose rages and laments boomed around the old newspaper.
In the past, editors knew little about what people read. Now they know precisely what readers want, and in the case of MailOnline it certainly isn’t the old left-baiting polemicists.
Publishers can measure how many people click on a piece, how long they look at it for, whether they make it past the first paragraphs, and then get bored, or stick with it to the end. They can tell where readers live and—because of their cookies in their browsers—their likely income and interests. (Have they been looking to buy a new car or maternity dress?) They use that knowledge to put customised advertisements in front of them. They can tell within minutes of publication whether an article is being retweeted, read and finished; whether, in short, it was worth publishing at all.
You would need Wilde’s heart of stone not to burst out laughing at the sight of right-wing propagandists reduced to irrelevance by the market forces they have spent their lives supporting. And if they were the only casualties of technological change, I would laugh too.
Unfortunately …
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The system turns journalists into thieves and liars. Not the traditional journalistic frauds in the Jayson Blair/Johann Hari mould but liars who lie because lying is a corporate imperative. To get traffic, fewer and fewer news sites can afford to send out writers to find original content. So they steal from other news sites, or lift and repackage a YouTube video or Twitter exchange that may go viral.
In a confessional piece that deserved far more attention than it received, Luke O’Neil, a Boston journalist, described in Esquire how “the churn-and-burn pace of daily writing has led to my passing along some pretty sketchy nonsense”. He would steal and rebrand anything that might catch the passing reader: a preacher feeling up a waitress in an American café, a comedian who live-tweeted a break-up on an apartment roof, anything whatsoever about celebrities without checking whether the stories were true.
Read the full opinion, Standpoint here
• Amanda Meade, The Guardian: Taxing times for Channel Nine as News Corp bites back
Media reports about Rupert Murdoch’s tax arrangements for News Corp Australia have not pleased the company. Last week Nine’s A Current Affair ran an eight-minute story off the back of Michael West’s Fairfax media report about the amount of tax the company pays.
“Rupert Murdoch’s media empire in the US has siphoned off $4.5bn of cash and shares from his Australian media businesses in the past two years, virtually tax free,” West wrote.
Channel Nine interviewed West for the story, called Tax cheats ripping off the Australian public, which is still available online, and the story pulled no punches. News Corp Australia, with Foxtel and Ikea, were called “greedy multinationals” who were making “obscene profits” at the expense of ordinary taxpayers.
The loyal Murdoch lieutenant and columnist Terry McCrann was quick to hit back, calling West “an inflatable clown” and attacking Nine. “What do you get when you marry Fairfax Media columnist Michael West with the Nine Network’s A Current Affair? Even more hysterical, utter rubbish, and totally false assertions about companies and tax than you normally get from West, Australian journalism’s ‘Whac-a-Mole’, writing alone.”
Now, Weekly Beast has been told, the rift between the two media giants has spilled over into affecting the coverage of Nine’s TV programs in the News Corp tabloids. Nine has confirmed a publicity photo shoot with the Daily Telegraph’s TV section scheduled for Monday was cancelled at the last minute. The shoot was with Morning’s co-hosts, Sonia Kruger and David Campbell, to mark Kruger’s return from maternity leave. Nine says it doesn’t know why the shoot was cancelled and News has declined to comment.
• The Independent: If Rupert Murdoch can’t swing it for the Tories, he will lose his grip over Britain Only now are the fruits of Ed Miliband’s laceration of News International four years ago fully ripening
