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?

Dawn of Brexit 

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

The Daily Mail is a right-wing, socially and economically conservative, mid-market tabloid that champions traditional British values, supports the Conservative Party, and often adopts populist, Eurosceptic, and anti-immigration stances. It positions its audience through sensationalist, emotive language and "them vs us" narratives, encouraging a "preferred reading" that reinforces, for example, traditional family values, support for the monarchy, and a demand for strict law and order. 

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

he paper consistently champions "British nationalism" and acts as a "moral entrepreneur," targeting "folk devils" (threats to traditional social norms) to appeal to readers who favor established standards

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?

the  top 3 are hard news about the Iran war while the bottom 2 are soft news about celebrity's. 

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

 They reflect it very well  as they  they combine soft and hard news .

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?

MailOnline is the world’s most-read English newspaper site by combining a free, high-volume celebrity/showbiz focus with addictive, image-heavy design and sensationalized "clickbait" headlines. It produces over 750-1,500 stories daily, utilizing endless scrolling and a "sidebar of shame" to keep users engaged with explosive, rapidly updating gossip content.

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,

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

The Daily Mail’s mode of address is aimed at women so the language and discursive strategies are ones more likely to appeal to preferred female audience. As such, the mode of address creates a relationship between the addresser (producers) and the addressee (readership). The print readership shows that the average age of people who read the mail print newspaper with the average age being 58, 52% Female  ,2/3 ABC1 and  14% under age of 34

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

Practical, Emotional, Associations 

 Practical: Practical techniques include:  bribery,  longevity, ease of use 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, repetition  comforting.

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

Associations include: celebrity endorsement; experts.

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? 

The Daily Mail is positioned as Britain’s most right-wing newspaper, with 81% of respondents viewing it as right-wing. It functions as a dominant Pro-Conservative party force, driving the political agenda for an older, middle-class audience. Read the full analysis at YouGov.

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?

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. 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.

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

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 knownfor 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.

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.

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

Paul 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, 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), 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.”

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. 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.

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

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 This motivation appeared to be that “he feared losing his council house to an immigrant family”).

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? 

media. 

They argue that newspapers have to reflect the needs and desires (interests) of the reader in order to maintain circulation and readership. Curran and Seaton, taking a participatory approach, consider that anyone should be able to set up a newspaper and that newspapers should maintain a liberal ideology. They do, however, acknowledge that this does not always happen in practice; newspapers can be wielded as propaganda tools to influence readers. However, the assumption that anyone is free to establish a paper is an illusion because the press has been industrialized; ‘ordinary people’ would require substantial capital to establish a paper.

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

 That  media conglomerates have executed their influence and dominance  through the internet  as the conglomerates and the legacy media  as they are well resourced  and  promoted

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

Mail. When current owner, Jonathan Harmsworth (4th Viscount Rothermere) was asked where the

company’s ‘future power’ lay he said “MailOnline if we make the right calls and invest more in content and grow our traffic, it can be a bigger business than the Daily Mail – financially, in terms of reach, and everything else.”

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

MailOnline offers a direct, immediate and ongoing conversation with the reader. The relationship then develops between editor and reader, as the editor can respond to reader likes or dislikes (much like a DJ might in a club). Clarke constantly edits the homepage so the, unlike the print Daily Mail, content is tweaked to appeal to widest readership and encourage the highest clicks. Clarke’s team are able to see how many people are reading a story an any one time, and respond accordingly.

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

The digital Daily Mail publishes around 1000

stories, but 10,000 pictures. As Clarke said in a live video ‘hangout’ with Mumbrella:

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

“The reason MailOnline has become a success is because we cover the waterfront. It’s all the news you need to know, all the news you wanna know. The big stories. The lighter stories. The completely amazing stories. You’re just competing for people’s time. So, I’m competing with people spending tome on their Facebook page... when they could be looking at pictures of Kim Kardashian. What you have to decide is what you want your site to be, and make it as compelling

and as sticky and engaging and interesting and fascinating – and as fun – as possible.”

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

Clarke constantly edits the homepage so the, unlike the print Daily Mail, content is tweaked to appeal to widest readership and encourage the highest clicks. Clarke’s team are able to see how many people are reading a story an any one time, and respond accordingly.

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

no we shouldn't be worried as most people on the internet now no longer have faith in institutions  and the industry and now  trust  the  independent  journalist instead.