DAILY BEAST, December 5, 2021

As other British newspaper dynasties disappeared, the oldest kept on. But now, with print on life support, the fourth Lord Rothermere is losing the man who saved his empire.

It’s been an uncomfortably rocky week for London’s last surviving Press Lord, who normally keeps a very low profile.

First, he was shame-named by Meghan Markle in her statement following her triumph in court against his London tabloid: “Today, the courts ruled in my favor—again—cementing that the Mail on Sunday, owned by Lord Jonathan Rothermere, has broken the law.” Then, on Friday, he lost the man who, in little more than a decade, built MailOnline, a digital business now valued at more than twice as much as his 125-year-old newspaper empire.

For at least half of the last century most of Britain’s national newspapers were owned or run by families headed by Lords. To be more precise, their Lordships Astor, Beaverbrook, Camrose, Kemsley, Rothermere and Thomson. Now Rothermere is the only one left standing. His dynasty is the oldest, based on the Daily Mail, founded in 1896.

According to the conventional wisdom about the merciless newspaper game, particularly as practiced in London, Rothermere’s business should have been roadkill long ago.

So why didn’t that happen?

The current Lord Rothermere is 53 years old. For a figure who could, if he chose, wield a lot of political clout, he makes very little noise.

The family has never supplied inspiration for a Succession kind of dynastic soap opera, as the Murdochs have. And yet last year the Daily Mail overtook Murdoch’s tabloid The Sun as the UK’s top-selling paper (this year Murdoch had to write down the value of the daily and Sunday editions of The Sun to zero because of the costs of settling phone hacking cases). Over the last five years the company Rothermere heads, the Daily Mail and General Trust, has been quietly transforming itself. He intends soon to return it to being a family business, by canceling its stock market listing and become a private limited company.

But most of the credit for the company’s survival has to go to a title that has never been in print, MailOnline, and the blowhard figure who created it, Martin Clarke, whose exit on Friday surprised the whole media world, and remains puzzling.

MailOnline was launched by Clarke in London 2007, but that was before the iPhone, the iPad and social media together led to a revolution in the way advertising was sold. The turning point came in 2011, when the site established a larger editorial base in Manhattan’s SoHo district, just as so-called programmatic advertising technology was being pioneered by BuzzFeed and Facebook. It was smart timing, because the old Madison Avenue ad agency culture was looking as dated as the magazine and newspaper publishing culture that it traded with. For the first time, using digital platforms, advertisers could measure the effectiveness of their ads directly based on the number of clicks they generated. It was the end of the long and delirious Mad Men party: algorithms bought and sold advertising without needing a three-martini lunch to clinch a contract.

At MailOnline, Clarke grasped the significance of this as a path to making the business profitable. Of course, this meant abandoning the idea that the worth of a story lay in its news value. Sometimes, a dozen different versions of the same story (or ad) were posted to see which combination of words, headline and pictures drew the most clicks and, therefore, captured an audience in line with what advertisers wanted.

It was a ruthless descent to a new dark art that was anathema to legacy newsmen—but not to Clarke. He had long shown his chops as a print editor with a ruthlessly competitive style but now transformed himself into a so-called “digital native,” talking the talk and walking the walk. He designed a new kind of hyper-tabloid that reduced news to a thread of staccato bursts of text sprinkled with celebrity eye candy—as well as unrelenting coverage of the greatest of all soap operas, the travails of the House of Windsor. (There were complaints that under the banner of “aggregation” the site was freely plagiarizing other journalists’ work, even putting invented bylines on the stories.)

Soon, MailOnline became a phenomenal mother lode for Rothermere. It now claims 24.9 million unique visitors a month (BuzzFeed claims 38 million). In the last 12 months its revenue has grown by 14 percent while the company’s print advertising revenue fell by 15 percent and the circulation of the papers fell by 6 percent. In May, JP Morgan Chase valued MailOnline at almost $730 million—more than twice the value of all Rothermere’s print titles.

But Clarke was only one part of the New York revolution. The other was the American CEO of MailOnline, Richard Caccappolo. Before Clarke’s departure, Caccappolo was appointed CEO of the London-based Daily Mail Media Group, and at that moment it seemed that the leadership of the company’s journalistic development had passed jointly to him and Clarke. As cultural shocks go, this looked like the biggest in the London newspaper world since Murdoch arrived in 1968 looking for a newspaper to buy….

Media analyst Peter Kreisky, chairman of the Kreisky Media Consultancy, told me: “The price of nurturing these clashing cultures will be high. Any attempt to fully integrate them will dilute their individual energy and focus. They appeal to very different audiences. MailOnline competes in the 24/7 minute-by-minute news as click-bait space with Facebook, BuzzFeed and Google, a tough game, while it’s far from clear how traditional Daily Mail journalism can sustain a digital base of sufficient scale. There is already brand confusion, between the digital and print versions. I can see, though, that taking the company private frees of them of the short-termism of quarterly earnings reporting and gives them the time to re-position the declining newspaper business—that’s important because the Daily Mail association underlies the credibility of the branding, for both print and the digital sites.”