In 1938, Hugh Cudlipp changed the world by publishing a picture of a topless model in a newspaper called The Sunday Pictorial.
From this point onward, the recipe for British tabloid journalism was fixed: strident politics, celebrity coverage and sexual titillation. Variations on the theme have sustained the tabloids’ role in popular culture and electoral politics for the past 80 years.
It’s been an extraordinary run. But is it coming to an end? The news that the five tabloids owned by Trinity Mirror — including The Daily Mirror — will soon make one-quarter of their journalists redundant suggests that if the end is not yet nigh, it’s certainly drawing closer.
Truth be told, the bundle of delights assembled by Hugh Cudlipp has been disintegrating for some time.
Political coverage — shrill or otherwise — was always something of a fig leaf. Declining circulations, voter apathy, TV debates and the rise of social media have eroded the tabloids’ ability to deliver votes. There’s little point in continuing to pretend that political coverage matters.
Titillation? The Page 3 girls made their debut in The Sun in 1970. Today, compared with what the web has to offer, Jo from Essex and Amy from Sheffield look as quaint as the saucy seaside postcards of an earlier era.
Only one element of Cudlipp’s original recipe — celebrity coverage — retains its appeal. Happily, the demented intensity of celebrity coverage also reflects the presence of a real commercial imperative: the entertainment industry’s need to shift units in an era of audience fragmentation.
Perhaps the Mail Online understands this. As Trinity Mirror prepared to make 200 journalists redundant last week, it emerged that the site has opened a bureau in Los Angeles.
It’s a small step, to be sure. But there could be more to come. According to comScore, Mail Online now qualifies as the second most visited English-language news website in the world, after the New York Times.
Exploiting that position would make a lot of sense. Nearly 30 percent of the world’s web users speak English — that’s more than the 400 million users who speak Chinese, or the 140 million who speak Spanish. For now, the United States represents the centre of gravity for this population, both in terms of absolute numbers and relative wealth.
And what unites this English-speaking world? Celebrity comes as close as we’re likely to get. Celebrity also remains close to the core of tabloidism, and probably defines it in the 21st century.
In one way, of course, this vision of the future is as old as the hills. The transatlantic celebrity conveyor belt dates back to 1844, when the American showman and impresario P.T. Barnum brought his dwarf variety act General Tom Thumb to Europe. Over the years, Barnum’s transatlantic freak shows grew bigger and bigger until, by the 1880s, his Barnum & Bailey circus was regularly touring to packed houses on both sides of the Atlantic.
Barnum owed much of his vast fortune to clever manipulation of the media. In this respect, he wrote the manual for generations of showbiz publicists. Today, if anything, our thirst for sensation is stronger. A transatlantic English-speaking market for celebrity news already exists. The question is whether pure-play sites like TMZ, or morphing tabloid sites, like the Mail Online, will seize the resulting opportunities first.
What if Mail Online decided to focus exclusively on celebrity news? In terms of U.S. eyeballs, Mail Online could quickly leapfrog upstarts like Perez Hilton (13.5 million unique users per month). It may also be able to sell advertising more effectively.
Look ahead three or four years, and the prospect emerges of a transatlantic site, mirroring the talent and capital that shifts restlessly between Los Angeles and London. It’s not outlandish to project a scenario in which Mail Online employs a similar number of journalists in the United States and the U.K.
Can the Mail reinvent itself in this way? In the long term, reinvention of some kind will be essential. Visibly, the business model that sustains British tabloid journalism is falling apart.
Circulation, rather than advertising, is the lifeblood of tabloid newspapers. Unlike broadsheets, the red tops make the bulk of their revenues at the newsagents’ counter. Last year, Trinity Mirror’s tabloids generated £460m in revenue. Almost two-thirds of this amount came from copy sales.
Historically, vast print circulations have elevated the most successful tabloids into an elite category of media that could be relied upon to reach the mass market. In the process, the tabloids became a default choice for advertisers.
Unfortunately, the tabloids’ lifeblood is ebbing away. At its peak, in March 1996, The Sun recorded its highest ever full-price circulation of 4,783,359. Today, the paper sells around 3 million copies a day. The Daily Mirror sells 1.2 million copies.
As print circulation declines, you might have expected the tabloids to reincarnate themselves as straightforward digital versions of their current selves.
Unfortunately, this won’t be a straightforward proposition. Not for the first time during The Great Transition, a business model that worked extremely well in the analogue world looks utterly implausible when transposed to the digital realm.
On the web, the tabloids have been outclassed in terms of pulling power. Attracting 10 million unique users a month (as Trinity Mirror’s tabloids do) or 20 million (as does The Sun) amounts to small beer in relative terms. Unable to replicate the reach that used to make them a default choice for advertisers in print, tabloid newspapers risk becoming just another digital media format in search of a future.
The tabloids possess another dirty little secret. During the past 15 years, their efforts to generate digital revenues have been little short of disastrous.
Trinity Mirror publishes two daily tabloids — The Daily Mirror and Daily Record in Scotland — plus three Sunday-only equivalents (The Sunday Mirror, The People and The Sunday Mail in Scotland). Last year, the sites published by these papers generated average monthly revenues of £400,000. This compares with the slightly less than £40m of print-related revenues on a monthly basis.
Broadsheets have been far more aggressive about expanding their digital operations. The Guardian, for example, attracts three times as many unique users as Trinity Mirror’s tabloids. Its digital revenues are seven or eight times greater.
Indeed, the Guardian’s digital revenues could grow sufficiently large to support an entire newsroom by the middle of the decade. The chances of this happening at The Daily Mirror seem remote.
There’s plenty of life left in print. But publishers need to start work on long-term alternatives to the failed approach of simply dumping print content into digital formats. Stripping down the disintegrating bundle of delights stitched together by Hugh Cudlipp in the 1930s and focusing exclusively on celebrity coverage could yet emerge as one route to salvation.
Photo Credit: CC-licensed: secretlondon123
