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Fighting for journalism and profitable news media
Doreen Lawrence: Mail ‘pretending to be my friend’ | DMGT revenue hit by Google changes
Plus Ladbible grows its revenue through direct deals with brands
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Good morning from the team at Press Gazette on Tuesday, 3 February.
Today’s newsletter is supported by Q5 - experts in building healthy, high-performing organisations.
Explore their latest insights on where accountability for attracting and retaining high-value audiences really sits.
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⚖️ The Mail had a bruising day at the High Court yesterday as Baroness Doreen Lawrence accused the title of “pretending to be her friend” whilst bugging her landline and prying into her bank accounts.
It is particularly damaging given the fact that the title’s “Murderers” front page of 1997, which named five men it believed had escaped justice over the killing of her son Stephen, is one of the most celebrated episodes in modern newspaper history.
Editor Paul Dacre pursued the story partly because he personally knew Stephen’s father. Using a newspaper front page to effectively convict five men of murder was “pretty cataclysmic”, as Dacre said at the time.
Baroness Lawrence said she was moved to sue after receiving an email from Prince Harry in 2022. His legal research team said it has received evidence from two private investigators who said they worked for the Mail.
One of those private eyes has since recanted his evidence against the Mail. Dacre and Stephen Wright, the reporter who worked on the Lawrence investigation, will give their side of the story when they are cross-examined later in the trial.
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💷 The latest accounts for Mail parent company DMGT are yet to show financial impact from privacy litigation on anything like the scale seen at rival publishers News UK and Reach.
Advertising revenue is down at DMGT’s consumer titles but the publisher has reported significant growth in subscriptions, fuelled by the launch of a partial paywall on the Daily Mail.
The fall in digital advertising has been driven, DMGT says, by falling search engine referral traffic since the launch of Google AI Overviews (the machine-written summaries that are stealing clicks from news publishers around the world).
This reflects the growth of direct marketing deals with brands to create sponsored editorial content on social media. This creator-style publishing model is a major theme for consumer-facing publishers this year.
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