We had the privilege of meeting some of the folks at the
The tabloid, a part of Trinity Mirror, had a circulation of just under 1 million last year, putting it third in the United Kingdom.
Aidan McGurran is a deputy managing editor at
McGurran is himself a local councillor, which is odd to American eyes. And he was disappointed, like all of Labour, in the general election. But the results puts the Mirror as an outside critic, which is probably more fun to be from their perspective. McGurran: “we’re about to see massive, massive cuts in welfare,” antithetical to Labour supporters. So they get to publish about that and take shots at the government.
“Show business, human interest and sports are enormously important … Our sports coverage is among the best and we take it really seriously,” he said.
McGurran says the Mirror’s circulation has posted a year-over-year decline of six to seven percent. He says that’s one of the best bad numbers in British media. (I haven’t seen all of the data.) The average age of the Daily Mirror newsprint audience is thought to be 54. The loyal, solid sale core set, there.
We also met Ben Rankin, the Daily Mirror’s online editor. He says his team is publishing about 500 stories per day.
“You have to get stories up very fast,” Rankin said. “There are some stories that we don’t do in the paper, but work online.”
That has to do with quality and the readership’s ethos. Basic principles of good journalism, quick writing, good headlines apply.
Rankin says there’s a regular balancing act of engaging content versus what can be delivered quickly. Their efforts have them at about a million uniques per month. (Aside: We were doing about that number at al.com when I left in 2008. They are at 5.7 million uniques per month earlier this year.) They’re looking at read-time and engagement. We’d call it stickiness.
Rankin offered the 75th anniversary of McDonald’s as an example. That snuck up on them, but the online team dreamed up content: old menus/prices, 75 things you didn’t know and commercials. (Including the spots were my first idea.) He said that McD’s feature made it into print, calling it a happy crossover between generational audiences.
“We can’t put a story up without a picture,” Rankin said, and it can’t always be the same boring clip art.
That followed directly into his list of things that “work well” for them online: “The macabre, plane crashes, conspiracy theories, ghosts.”
He says “works well” a lot.
Facebook, Rankin says, provides the Daily Mirror with 30 to 35 percent of their overall traffic. They now have five people on social media. No one was working in that area last year. The plan, he says, is to publish to Facebook every 15 minutes.
“Any more turns off your audience. Any less throws away an audience,” Rankin said.
One of the best parts of our conversation: “We have a need for stories to be interactive, engaging” and not just 10 paragraphs. So if you’re only a writer …
Daily Mirror is publishing ~100 vids/day, 10-20 they shoot. When we were hanging out with the online folks the videos were of a guy only just avoiding being hit by a subway train and of Edge falling off the stage at a U2 concert. Behind the online crew there is a large flatscreen showing realtime analytics from the site. They can tell, at a glance, what is working and what isn’t. Based on the way we talked they promoted things that were successful, and pushed down things that were struggling, largely on feel.
In their videos themselves, the goal is to show few talking heads. Video, they say, is the story. The plan, then, is a good one, show people in action.
The Daily Mirror newsroom is one of the nicest ones I’ve ever seen. Busy and quiet and bustling, all at the same time. I found their late adoption of social media and their late dedication of serious online work to be a bit odd, but part of that is cultural. Newspapers are shrinking in London and the UK, but there’s still a strong readership, too. My guess, without seeing a bunch of crosstabs, is that the British media and their audiences are on a different part of the curve than their American counterparts.
