How the Daily Mail British Tabloid Is Conquering U.S. Celebrity News and Gossip – Vanity Fair

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Around 5 p.m. Pacific time on Valentine’s Day, on the southern tip of Vancouver Island, just a couple of weeks before COVID-19 turned the world upside down, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle emerged from a turboprop jet and stepped onto the apron of Victoria International Airport, a short drive from the $14 million, 11,416-square-foot mega-manse that they’d recently rented from a Russian oligarch, or a Canadian billionaire, or neither of the above, depending on which tabloid tales you believe. In dark jeans matching her Rothy’s flats made out of recycled plastic water bottles, a $1,790 sustainable Prada duffle bag dangling from her wrist, Meghan tucked her hair behind her ear and smiled as she chitchatted with a small entourage. Harry, also cheery and casual as he lugged a hard-shell carry-on, trailed closely behind in a baseball cap and Adidas Gazelles.

As they walked toward a black car, a paparazzo focused his lens and zoomed in. He was on assignment for the celebrity news agency Backgrid, which had gotten a tip that Harry and Meghan were en route to their opulent Canadian retreat. The photographer had bought a random plane ticket to gain entry into the airport, where he spent the next few hours staring through a window as he staked out the arrivals. When the royal couple’s flight finally landed, the photographer snapped into action and got a set of money shots, crystal clear enough to reveal every crease and wrinkle in Meghan’s pinstripe blouse, the length of her husband’s ginger beard, the glint of their wedding bands and the color of Harry’s belt. The following morning, Backgrid auctioned the scoop to a small handful of clients. The images ended up going for more than $25,000, and it was sort of obvious from the start who the winning bidder would be. They ended up with DailyMail.com, the U.S.-focused website of the U.K.’s Daily Mail, which blasted out the snaps in a splashy exclusive that got picked up and linked to by click-hungry news outlets the world over: “Harry and Meghan are pictured together for the first time since Megxit.”

Much like Harry and Meghan, DailyMail.com is a larger-than-life British-American mash-up, a marriage of the marauding spirit of Fleet Street and the quixotic bravado of the U.S. digital-content boom. The site’s seemingly inexorable rise has been one of the more unexpected success stories in American media—a bawdy, obstreperous, middle-market foil to the BuzzFeeds and Vices and HuffPosts of the world, which have seen their mojo plateau over the past couple of years. DailyMail.com’s umbrella entity, the Daily Mail, cofounded in 1896 by the legendary publishing magnate Alfred Charles William Harmsworth, is considered by many to be the most influential newspaper in England, with its 1.2 million weekday print circulation (second only in paid readership to Rupert Murdoch’s Sun), its heavily female audience, and its reputation as a vigorous gatekeeper of traditional center-right British values. On this side of the Atlantic, thanks to the New York- and Los Angeles-based web operation it set up just over a decade ago, the Mail has become America’s reigning tabloid titan, one that you get on your desktop or smartphone instead of newsstands and supermarket checkout lines.

The Mail is a destination for JUICY NEWSBREAKS: Anthony Weiner’s teen-sexting habits, the Rob Porter–Hope Hicks DALLIANCE.

On average, between DailyMail.com and its digital counterparts in the U.K. and Australia (there’s a landing page for each country, and they all roll into dailymail.co.uk), the Mail churns out roughly 1,700 stories, tens of thousands of photos, and 900-some-odd videos each day. A handful of these end up as co-exclusives with DailyMail TV, a three-year-old syndicated series that won a Daytime Emmy last year for its 2018 season, which featured Asia Argento’s first and only English-language interview following the death of Anthony Bourdain, the first joint sit-down with Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle, and a scoop about Wendy Williams checking into a sober-living house in Queens. There’s also a regular column by the British media personality and former CNN host Piers Morgan, DailyMail.com’s editor at large, who has a knack for seizing on things that piss off everyday Americans (and Brits) and channeling that anger into pithy essays that draw as many as 2 million readers apiece. (Harry and Meghan are hypocrites, woke Hollywood people are hypocrites, etc.)

The whole thing is a loud smorgasbord of attention-grabbing world and national headlines (very pandemic-centric at the time of this writing, as with most media outlets), lurid crime and weird news (the doomsday-cult mom, the Ukrainian dwarf adoption saga), tawdry celebrity fare, obsessive scrutiny of the royal family, and an endless stream of lifestyle, health, and science stories that feel like either anxiety triggers or bowls of candy. The ginormous photos and pesky banner ads might crash your browser, the persistent grammatical and punctuation errors might make you cringe, and by the time you click through your 7th or 14th or 21st article of the day, you might start to feel a little icky. But who cares—it’s utterly addictive, and you’ll keep scrolling, just like the other 80 million Americans and 240 million people around the world who visit the Mail’s website each month (at least according to the publication’s internal metrics).

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