It’s common practice amongst newspaper people to hold the Daily Mail, and its editor Paul Dacre, in quite some regard. “Whatever you think about its politics,” the line goes, “you’ve got to admire the professionalism with which it’s put together. It’s a brilliant newspaper.” Which is rather like asking me to ignore the blood seeping out of my throat while admiring the knife work.
So I was rather surprised to find myself agreeing with Dacre’s speech to the Society of Editors, at least in part. First, he eviscerates Richard Desmond as a pornographer who is “contemptuous” of journalists. Nice one. Then he has this to say about the Mail online, after a mea culpa about being late to the digital party:
“On any given weekday Mail Online now attracts 450,000 British users, each of whom will spend on average nine minutes per visit and over 20% of whom will pay more than one visit that day. I’d love to tell you what the equivalent figures are for our competitors but they won’t publish them.
This in the context of remarks about other publishers’ “vainglorious” trumpeting of monthly uniques. As any fule kno, monthly uniques are increasingly meaningless (to the extent they ever were), and I much prefer Dacre’s formulation of daily users plus time spent plus number of visits. That’s a far better measure of the amount and type of attention a newspaper is getting.
And then just as I find myself applauding Dacre’s wisdom, he starts in with this:
But my question is why does not a day go by that the subsidariat papers, blissfully oblivious of their own pocket-sized shapes and circulations, don’t carry the obligatory sneer at the tabloid press?
And we’re back in paranoid Dacreland. Listen Paul, if your newspaper is so strong and so butch and so wonderful, why on earth are you so worried about what the Guardian thinks of you? Could it be that (whisper it) you think it’s a bit better – morally, culturally and politically – than the garbage you print every day?
The problem with Time Spent is that is can not be easily measured. All web stats programs have their own way of calculating time spent. The challenge is that the time for last page can not be recorded. The other problem with this stat is if people leave their browsers open!
Dacre’s a sensationalist, troublemaker, and outsider – hard for journalists not to find something to like in that mix.
But, of course, he has used those powers simply to cause sensation and trouble as ends in themselves – so as an “outsider”, he makes a poor moralist.