I am thinking of starting up a free internet site called ‘Cancer and House Prices’.
I am thinking of starting up a free internet site called ‘Cancer and House Prices’. Every day, a new piece of information, which I will make up, about tumours and property values and perhaps how these two phenomena are unexpectedly linked. I will also run photographs of young people you have never heard of but who sing in The Saturdays or star in things like Hollyoaks — largely nubile women in thongs with large breasts and tattoos — and supply a paragraph or two about how they haven’t got cancer or that they are about to buy a house, or simply live in a house, and how much it is worth. I expect to clean up, with all the online advertising that comes my way.
The Mail Online is about to become the world’s most popular news site, a phenomenal achievement as well as being a comment on what precisely the world wants, rather than what decent-minded bien-pensant liberals assumed it wanted. Karl Marx foresaw a golden future for the working classes which involved, as I remember, working in the morning and reading Plato in the afternoon. Things have worked out differently; the working classes, or at least the lower middle classes, may indeed do a spot of work but they will not read Plato in the afternoons. They will read Peter Hitchens instead, and then some stuff about tumours, slebs and house prices.
The Daily Mail online version currently reaches about 70 million people, a substantial proportion of them in the USA. It is the second most popular news site in the world, after the New York Times. But its rise has been exponential and it is likely to claim the top spot some time this summer. The New York Times simply will not be able to compete; check out its website and you will see a drably represented facsimile of the paper’s hard copy, all written in that ponderous, stilted and self-important prose which will be familiar to you if you ever try to read American newspapers, the sort of prose which characterised our own broadsheets at around about the time Abraham Lincoln was fidgeting in his seat hoping the bloody play would end quite soon. By the time you’ve scrolled down a centimetre and found its second top story of the day — ‘As Secession Nears, Sudan Steps Up Drive to Stop Rebels’ — the will to live may have deserted you. The US edition of the Mail online offers you a colourful alternative; its political coverage is a cat-fight between Bristol Palin and Cindy McCain; you also get a photograph of a dog with an odd expression, another photograph of a bat eating a scorpion, a story about some Siamese or conjoined twins, a reminder that smoking gives you cancer and some stuff about nubile young women slebs of whom I have never heard — including a photograph of what someone called Helen Flanagan looks like without any make-up. There is nothing that I can find about that Sudan secession business, although there is a serious article about the recession and house prices.
But say what you like, it is all superbly executed; the Mail is a paper which knows its audience. And it transpires that its audience’s taste in news, in how it views the world, is not quite so uniquely British as many had thought or hoped. The Americans are just as atavistically bitter and vengeful and unhappy as we are, just as scared of horrible diseases and as susceptible, in their lighter moments, to meaningless sleb bilge, just as transfixed about what their house is worth today, tomorrow and the day after.
I don’t mean to be slighting about the Daily Mail; its news judgment is unerringly sharp, its writing on the news pages, if not the op-eds, succinct. It may convey a somewhat stunted and narrow world view and pander to its audience’s appetite for simplicities and often hypocrisies; but it is brilliant pandering, without doubt, done with a sureness of touch. It knows, from every story which emerges, exactly how its readers will take the news: they will be angry and they cannot believe it is happening and frankly they could not make it up, could they? It was a strange conceit, the notion that only we British were like this. Our form of journalism is both feared and derided around the world, by those who prefer that headline about the secession in Sudan. But the Yanks have never quite grasped how successful a middle-market newspaper can be and how it will drag in both the aspirant working class and middle class when they want to slum it for a while. In the US, there’s the National Enquirer and the New York Times and precious little in between, as if the entire population could be divided neatly into two camps: imbeciles and intellectuals. But this has never been the case, either over there or over here.
At the moment the Mail is still making a loss on its online investment; not so calamitous a loss as the Guardian is making week in, week out for its own online presence (which also does very well abroad), but a loss nonetheless. It is probably too early to say that the newspaper industry over here will survive its otherwise inexorable decline by churning out free content on the web. It still seems likely that the papers will sooner or later be forced to charge a few quid for the benefit of reading the reams of content — and the Mail online already charges for advert-free copy. But there is life in the old beast.
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