Daily Mail » Encyclo » Nieman Journalism Lab

about / archives / contact / subscribe / twitter

Daily Mail

Key links:

Primary website:
dailymail.co.uk

Primary Twitter:
@MailOnline

All key links »

Editor’s Note: Encyclo has not been regularly updated since August 2014, so information posted here is likely to be out of date and may be no longer accurate. It’s best used as a snapshot of the media landscape at that point in time.

The Daily Mail is a British tabloid newspaper with the largest online audience in the world.

Mail Online grew rapidly into one of the most-visited news websites by 2007, when its editors began chasing traffic by posting aggregated news stories, and prioritizing large photo spreads with long headlines to bolster visits. It had reached 154 million unique visitors by late 2013.

Founded in 1896 as a women’s newspaper, the Daily Mail also publishes editions in Scotland and Ireland, and launched The Mail on Sunday in 1982. It opened a New York office to house its online staff in 2011, and much of the Mail Online’s success online has been a result of its growing American audience, which now accounts for a third of all traffic.

In January 2012, the Daily Mail launched an India-specific edition of its website, Mail Online India. That month, MailOnline surpassed The New York Times to become the most popular newspaper website in the world, with over 50 million monthly unique visitors.

Peers, allies, & competitors:

Recent Nieman Lab coverage:

March 26, 2025 / Sarah Scire

“Some hard and important lessons”: One of the most promising local news nonprofits looks back — and ahead — It’s hard not to root for the National Trust for Local News. Heralded as a savior of local newspapers, the nonprofit has presented itself as the ideal foil to the hedge fund-owned chains that slash local newsroom jobs ...

March 25, 2025 / Joshua Benton

Jeffrey Goldberg got the push notification of all push notifications — and a hell of a story — Journalism’s biggest scoops usually require months — years! — of shoe-leather reporting. Developing sources. Building trust. Coaxing out documents. Analyzing data. Assembling tiny fragments of information — p...

March 20, 2025 / Joshua Benton

There’s another reason the L.A. Times’ AI-generated opinion ratings are bad (this one doesn’t involve the Klan) — In 1964, Philip Converse published what would become one of the most cited papers in all of political science, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics.”1 It was a result of a movement at the University ...

March 20, 2025 / Sarah Scire

After years of exploring a sale, The Skimm is acquired by Ziff Davis — The digital media company Ziff Davis — owner of CNET, Mashable, Lifehacker, and PC Mag as well as a number of shopping and B2B sites — has acquired The Skimm. The Skimm will join Ziff Davis’s health and wellnes...

March 19, 2025 / Hanaa' Tameez

Report for America’s parent organization will “sunset” its in-house editorial projects to focus on funding local journalism — After a decade at the helm, Charlie Sennott is leaving the GroundTruth Project, the nonprofit journalism organization he founded in 2014 that also launched Report for America and Report for the World. Sennott, a 2006 Nie...

All Lab posts on Daily Mail »

Recently around the web, from Mediagazer:

All Mediagazer posts on Daily Mail »

Primary author: Linda Kinstler. Main text last updated: June 12, 2014.

Make this entry better

Explore: EveryBlock

EveryBlock is a site owned by Comcast that collects and sorts local news data and hosts community conversation on a block-by-block level. The site ran from 2008 to 2013 — owned most of that time by msnbc.com — before closing and being relaunched in 2014 by Comcast. The site was launched in 2008 by Chicago-based journalist and developer Adrian…

Put Encyclo on your site

Embed this Encyclo entry in your blog or webpage by copying this code into your HTML: