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Fighting for journalism and profitable news media
Mail’s Deep Dive drives new subs | Future layoffs as tech brands hurt by AI Overviews
And farewell to Jeffrey Archer, whose serial dishonesty was exposed by the tabloids
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👋 Hello from the team at Press Gazette on Tuesday, 6 October.
🎯 When the Daily Mail first launched its impressive Deep Dive visual storytelling strand I thought ‘wow, these articles are going to win some awards’. And, somewhat cynically, I wondered whether that would be their main purpose – a loss leader to boost perception of a brand mainly associated with showbiz and crime coverage.
Deep Dive has won lots of awards. But it is also driving serious revenue for the Mail with the result that it is now expanding to a 20-strong dedicated team.
The Daily Mail’s director of visual storytelling Harry Lewis-Irlam told Press Gazette that Deep Dive articles now average 440,000 page views and typically drive between 60 and 100 new subscribers (joining for 99p per month for a five-month trial).
An interactive article on the popularity of baby names has driven some 4,500 new subscriptions on its own, Lewis-Irlam said.
And the Deep Dive team is now also working with commercial partners, like the Alzheimer’s Society, on sponsored content campaigns.
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👿 Google’s cynical mission to turn its online ecosystem into a walled garden continues to cost journalists their jobs as Future brands Techradar and Tom’s Guide make more redundancies.
The changes follow plunging traffic after Google decided to largely stop being a window on the internet and instead keep more audience and ad revenue itself.
A few years ago a search for reviews of “Sony’s most premium headphones” would likely have surfaced an article on Techradar.
Now, you don’t see the Techradar article (still the top search result) until three scrolls down the Google search results page for the above query. Instead, Google offers users a pretty in-depth 300-word AI Overview review peppered with links to Youtube rather than publisher pages.
Future still appears to be some way from finding an alternative online business model that will return it to the growth it saw when traffic was booming and programmatic advertising was buoyant.
At time of writing the company has a scarcely believable market cap of £263m (despite pre-tax profit of £92m and turnover of £739m in 2025). Reminder: Future has spent £1.6bn on acquiring other companies since 2006.
Because shareholders bet on future performance, declining revenue and turnover spell doom for a company’s value if investors don’t believe the trend is going to change.
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🪦 Goodbye Jeffrey Archer, whose death provides a reminder of the great work done by tabloids like the News of the World in their heyday.
In 1986, the News of the World revealed that then deputy chairman of the Conservative Party Archer had paid £2,000 to buy the silence of prostitute Monica Coghlan. More impressively, in 1999 the News of the World taped Archer admitting to a friend that he had faked his alibi to win £500,000 in libel damages from the Daily Star in a legal action resulting from the Coghlan affair.
The story derailed Archer’s bid to be London mayor and ultimately saw him jailed for what the judge described as “the most serious offence of perjury I have experienced”.
Today’s obituary of Archer in The Times is a fantastic read which tries to assemble the “facts as they are known” about a politician and best-selling author who had an “elastic relationship with the truth”.