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Daily Mail Australia readers accustomed to the outlet’s practice of repurposing and “following” other news outlets’ coverage, often in strikingly similar terms, will retain free access to that content despite the outlet’s introduction of a new partial paywall this week.
This week, Daily Mail Australia announced it would be launching a new subscription service and “deepening its relationship with readers”.
The paywall, called Mail+ and already in place in the United Kingdom, will provide “daily premium stories and a “‘Best of The Mail’ weekly newsletter” for $1.99 per month.
The content provided behind the paywall, according to a press release, will include “some of Daily Mail Australia’s most popular offerings including news, crime and showbiz exclusives, fascinating true-life features, the latest in lifestyle, expert beauty and health advice, and columnists”.
Asked by Crikey whether the “aggregated” content produced as part of the company’s well-established but controversial practice of repurposing other news outlets’ coverage (sometimes running paywalled exclusives from other outlets for free) would be put behind the paywall, Daily Mail Australia editor Felicity Hetherington said simply “no”.
One journalist who works for a local paywalled publication told Crikey “if Australian media is to survive, paywalls are needed”.
“I imagine Daily Mail’s audience will still struggle to adjust to a paywall as it often plagiarises content from paywalled publications, so it allows access to those stories for free,” the journalist said.
Another reporter told Crikey that it was “interesting that the Daily Mail management now seemingly delineates between real journalism that will be behind a paywall, and the copy-and-paste ‘aggregating’ of stories that we’ve all been victim to at some point”.
“I hope for the sake of our industry that their premium content doesn’t also fall victim to copy-and-paste from other websites. Because that isn’t good for anyone. But I look forward to seeing how they react when that inevitably happens,” they said.
Hetherington, despite her predecessor’s defences of “junk journalism” and position on the use of AI in newsrooms, also told Crikey that the Mail doesn’t “use AI for our free stories so there’s no way we’d use it for premium content”.
Former Daily Mail Australia, now-Guardian Australia reporter Cait Kelly wrote in 2022 that “[At Daily Mail Australia] ripping off other journos’ work is the cornerstone of the business model. That and writing up Instagram pics of skinny chicks in bikinis. As a cadet I was trained to copy-paste”.
In 2018, Media Watch produced a segment attacking the Daily Mail for its practices, which was responded to with an anonymously bylined article in the Mail titled “Biased Barry and his taxpayer-funded Muppets”.
SEN’s Charles Goodsir told Crikey that he was “aware clickbait [was] a valuable tool in easy-to-digest media … but sometimes you click on an article and feel cheated. I can recall a story about [Seven] Sunrise host Edwina Bartholomew explaining her ‘shock’ absence from the show for a few weeks. I clicked on the article and it was her explaining that she had been on approved leave. Imagine paying money just to be tricked like that.”
Asked about the prospects of success for the Mail’s partial paywall, Goodsir said: “I think it will actually go pretty well. There might be an initial decline but I don’t think it will have that major of an impact. I certainly won’t be paying, but … there will be several people out there who will happily continue consuming the Daily Mail for a fee.”