Mail Online has hit 100,000 paying subscribers to its partial paywall in less than ten months.

The news site and its apps began restricting access to certain articles labelled as part of the Mail+ subscription for UK users at the end of January.

Mail+ launched in the UK only but rolled out in Australia and New Zealand last month. A US launch is planned for 2025.

Initially up to 15 articles per day were paywalled but now around 30 articles a day are marked as available for Mail+ subscribers only. Mail Online publishes around 1,500 stories per day with most remaining free to read.

Daily Mail editor-in-chief Ted Verity said: “The success of Mail+ is proof that readers are happy to pay for the kind of high-quality journalism the Mail has long been famous for.

“To hit 100,000 subscribers so quickly is a fantastic achievement and a huge testament to the brilliance of our journalists and the Mail+ team.

“But this is just the start – and we are hungry for much, much more.”

Mail+ currently costs £1.99 per month for a year and then goes up to £6.99 a month.

Mail Online’s paywalled articles come from some of the brand’s core content areas including showbiz and royal, real-life stories, health and personal finance advice, and its star columnists including Richard Eden and Bryony Gordon.

On Friday afternoon, Mail+ articles on the homepage included:

• EXCLUSIVE: They cut open my skull to remove my brain tumour, reveals CAPRICE. And this terrifying brush with death changed my life…
• The creepy things that Russell Brand did when I dated him that I now see as huge red flags: BRYONY GORDON
• Suffering from memory loss, fatigue and body pain? The tell-tale signs you could have Lyme disease – after Miranda Hart revealed it took her 30 YEARS to get diagnosed
• How being the golden child or the black sheep can define your life: Top experts reveal the toll your family role can take… and how to break free
• I discovered my ‘ordinary’ husband had a depraved secret addiction – and it all unravelled when he accused ME of cheating

Articles behind the paywall are clearly marked on the homepage with an M+ logo next to the headline.

In addition, the Mail has 92,327 subscribers to Mail+ editions (a version of the newspaper optimised for tablet and mobile). This also costs £1.99 per month for the first year, rising to £12.99 per month.

DMG Media now joins the group of less than 40 publishers worldwide who have secured more than 100,000 website subscribers.

Mail Online had a UK audience of 18.3 million in September, marginally ahead of The Sun and The Independent and just behind The Guardian.

The Sun has recently begun rolling out a registration wall asking users to sign up with their email address to read certain articles but it does not ask them to pay. The Sun’s wall initially mainly restricted access to some of its best-known commentators and writers such as Trevor Kavanagh, Rod Liddle and Tony Parsons but it has begun to expand to other areas such as health.

UK regional publisher Newsquest hit its own 100,000 milestone for paying digital subscribers in September, four years after launching a soft paywall across most of its biggest sites. Newsquest titles include the Brighton Argus, South Wales Argus, Oxford Mail and Eastern Daily Press.

The post Mail Online hits 100,000 paying subscribers appeared first on Press Gazette.

The Independent had a record traffic month in the US in September overtaking rivals The Guardian and Daily Mail according to audience data provider Comscore.

The title, which launched a new URL for its US edition this summer at the-independent.com, had 41.4 million unique visitors in September according to Comscore.

This was up 41% from 29.4 million in August and an increase of 78% year-on-year from 23.3 million in September 2023.

By way of comparison The Guardian had 34.8 million visitors on desktop and mobile in September according to Comscore while the Daily Mail had 32.1 million. The Guardian first launched its US digital edition in 2007 while Mail Online opened its first US newsroom in Los Angeles in 2010 then its American headquarters in New York in 2012.

Of the British outlets to expand into the US more recently, The Sun had 19.1 million uniques, the Express had 10.3 million and the Mirror had 8.7 million.

The US Sun launched in 2020 but was forced to make editorial redundancies in the US in September, saying it needed to "reset the strategy and resize the team to secure the long term, sustainable future for The Sun’s business in the US" amid changes from Google and Facebook that have hit many sites hard. The two Reach titles launched their US titles early last year.

The Independent also shared Comscore data for leading US newspaper websites for September as follows: The New York Times (81.8 million), USA Today (76.9 million), New York Post (72.2 million) and The Washington Post (51.3 million).

Audience data can markedly fluctuate from month to month but The Independent sees its September Comscore data as a major milestone on its journey since going digital-only in 2016.

It now hopes to harness its recent growth to make a mark during the post-election period and Donald Trump's second presidency.

The Independent editor Geordie Greig on 'milestone moment'

The Independent editor Geordie Greig told Press Gazette it was a "milestone moment" from what he called the "industry gold standard" data provider Comscore.

He added that it was a "great validation of what we see as our journalistic ethics and of the reach and the richness of our content and our unbeatable data knowledge, combined with our great American team led by Louise Thomas".

Thomas joined The Independent in December from dailymail.com in the US, which she edited from 2019. Greig is also a former senior Mail figure, having edited the Mail on Sunday for six years and then the Daily Mail for three years before being fired by proprietor Lord Rothermere in November 2021.

The US is a significant part of The Independent’s 24-hour global team. Greig begins his day in the UK talking to the audience team in Delhi, before later passing the baton to New York, then Los Angeles, then back to India. Politics and crime are particularly successful content areas, he said.

"But it's essentially just us having great digital knowledge to work out how we combine journalistic nouse with digital knowledge, and we have a seemingly unbeatable team which is which is proving a success."

Speaking on Wednesday, as Donald Trump was confirmed as the next president of the US, Greig said: "We will be upping our energy and ambition to cover America even more fully. With the Trump presidency coming in that will be a source of enormous interest for our readers, but we will take a deep dive into that and find great reach and richness for content."

Asked whether he is expecting another "Trump bump", the audience boost to news media seen during his first presidency, Greig added: "Do you know what, he has a propensity to make people want to know what's going on inside America, from inside America and from outside America. And so that is good for journalism. We'll have to see whether it's good for America."

Regardless he said The Independent's growth is sustainable: "Look at our track record, we’ve grown every year since 2016."

Mail says it has 'huge, direct US audience'

Despite the September milestone some of the other British sites have bigger overall global readership. For example, according to Similarweb which estimates visits rather than visitors, The Independent had 106.3 million visits in September whereas The Guardian had 303.8 million and the Mail had 279 million. Both companies estimate traffic based on their own audience tracking methodology.

In addition the Mail highlighted to Press Gazette the fact it is still winning on engagement as opposed to pure audience reach, as well as its recent success growing on other platforms.

A DMG Media spokesperson said: "Dailymail.com remains the number one British-born publisher for engagement in the US, with substantially more page views and time spent on our website and app than any of our competitors.

"Unlike our rivals, our world-beating journalism has allowed us to grow a huge, direct US audience – built on loyalty among our long-term users.

"Our addictive content has also captivated a new generation of viewers across our multiple platforms, with 21 million Tiktok followers, 24 billion video views in 2024 so far, plus 1.2 billion video views on Youtube and 35 million podcast downloads, proving our trusted brand is able to cut through on any platform."

Press Gazette's monthly rankings of the biggest news websites use data from Similarweb, which put The Independent as the 29th site in the US in September with 39.7 million visits behind The Guardian (21st place, 67.8 million) and Daily Mail (tenth place, 113 million). In addition the BBC was in 13th spot with 100.1 million.

In the UK in September, industry-recognised data from Ipsos iris put The Independent in fifth place but almost level with Mail Online in third and The Sun in fourth (all rounded to a monthly audience reach of 18.3 million). The Guardian was ahead on 19.6 million.

The Independent's chief executive Christian Broughton told Press Gazette last month the brand had seen "really strong" revenue growth last year among its five key strategic pillars, of which its US expansion is one alongside e-commerce, video arm Independent TV, reader revenues and AI.

The US is bringing in 23% of The Independent's total revenues and has just under 20% of total staff with a team of around 46 journalists.

The seriousness of its ambitions in the US were revealed last year when it moved its then-chief executive Zach Leonard to become global chief operating officer and president, North America.

The post Comscore data: Independent overtook Mail and Guardian in US in September appeared first on Press Gazette.

Press Gazette is honoured to announce the finalists for the British Journalism Awards 2024.

This year’s British Journalism Awards attracted 750 entries encompassing every major news organisation in the UK.

The finalists are announced today following a three-week process involving 80 independent judges and two days of jury-style meetings.

In order to make the shortlists work has to be revelatory, show journalistic skill and rigour and serve the public interest.

The winners will be announced on 12 December at a dinner in London hosted by Radio 2 presenter and journalist Jeremy Vine.

Details here about how to book tickets.

The shortlist for News Provider of the Year will be announced following a second round of judging. The winners of Journalist of the Year, the Marie Colvin Award and the Public Service prize will be announced on the night.

Chairman of judges and Press Gazette editor-in-chief Dominic Ponsford said: “Without journalism, Boris Johnson would still be prime minister, wronged postmasters would not have a voice and victims of the infected blood scandal would not have a chance of compensation.

“The 2024 British Journalism Awards shortlists celebrate the stories which would not be told without journalists willing to shine a light on uncomfortable truths and publications brave enough to back them up.

“Congratulations to all our finalists and thank you to everyone who took the time to enter the British Journalism Awards.

“In a media world which is increasingly controlled by a few parasitic technology platforms it is more important than ever to celebrate the publishers willing to invest in and support quality journalism that makes a difference for the better in our world.”

British Journalism Awards 2024 shortlist in full:

Social Affairs, Diversity & Inclusion Journalism

Natasha Cox, Ahmed El Shamy, Rosie Garthwaite — BBC Eye Investigations

• Perfume’s Dark Secret

Jessica Hill — Schools Week

• Missing from mainstream: Excluded children with nowhere to go
• ‘Out of sight, out of mind’: The rise of unregistered alternative provision
• Hospital schools: On the mental health crisis frontline

Sasha Baker, Valeria Rocca — The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

• The parents group at the centre of a rollback of trans rights
• ‘One day they may thank us for that “abuse”’: Inside the Bayswater Support Group

Rianna Croxford, Ruth Evans, Cate Brown, Ed McGown, Tom Stone, Ed Campbell, Karen Wightman — BBC Panorama

• The Abercrombie Guys: The Dark Side of Cool

Daniel Hewitt, Imogen Barrer, Mariah Cooper, Reshma Rumsey — ITV News

• Nowhere to go: Britain’s homeless emergency

Louise Tickle — Tortoise Media

• Taking the stand: Grace’s story
• Taking the stand: Emma’s story

Abi Kay — Farmers Weekly

• Level the Field
• Is there a problem with young farmer culture?
• Editor’s view: Facing hard truths about young farmer culture

Joshua Nelken-Zitser, Ida Reihani, Kit Gillet — Business Insider

• Iran will pay for gender-transition surgery, but it comes at a cost — your dignity

Features Journalism

Sophie Elmhirst — 1843 magazine, The Economist and The Guardian

• The last stand of the call-centre worker
• Chortle chortle, scribble scribble: inside the Old Bailey with Britain’s last court reporters
• Last love: a romance in a care home

Jenny Kleeman — The Guardian

• America’s premier pronatalists on having ‘tons of kids’ to save the world: ‘There are going to be countries of old people starving to death’
• She was accused of faking an incriminating video of teenage cheerleaders. She was arrested, outcast and condemned. The problem? Nothing was fake after all
• ‘I know someone who played noughts and crosses on one’: meet the top surgeon who burned his initials on a patient’s liver

Sirin Kale — The Guardian

• ‘My child was drowning’: life and death on an English maternity ward
• The life and tragic death of John Balson: how a true crime producer documented his own rising horror
• The Russell murders: is Michael Stone in prison for a brutal crime he didn’t commit?

Zoe Beaty — The Independent

• How Nigel Farage took over my hometown – and why Keir Starmer should be worried
• My battle to bring a predatory Met Police officer from the same unit as Wayne Couzens to justice
• ‘A court packed with those who know their way around already, and jails are too full to take them’

Inderdeep Bains — Daily Mail

• My doctors insist it’s time I died – but I will fight them: Extraordinary case of 19-year-old woman suffering from Charlie Gard condition battling medics’ attempts to ‘condemn her to death’
• Sudiksha: ‘Condemned to Die in Secret’ – The Shocking Story of the 19-year-old’s fight to live

David James Smith — The Independent

• How did so many miss the sinister warning signs about James Bulger’s killer for so long?
• Is Lucy Letby innocent? I’m a miscarriage of justice investigator – and here’s what I think…
• The wife of this Murdoch executive has been missing since the Sixties – will her body now be found?

Fiona Hamilton — The Times

• Nottingham attacks: ‘We have no faith in the police. We want justice’
• ‘A horrible way to die … and no doctors can help you’
• Realising Sarah Everard got into a sex offender’s car was horrific

Barbara McMahon — Daily Mail

• Ghislaine Maxwell ‘was tortured in prison – now she’s ready for a comeback’: Jeffrey Epstein’s socialite pimp runs half marathons at low-security Florida lock-up and is now ‘focused and motivated’ for her appeal next week, her brother reveals
• ‘I shook Epstein’s hand and asked him what my daughter would be doing’: Virginia Roberts’s father describes dropping her off at paedophile’s mansion, meeting ‘despicable’ Ghislaine… and blasts Prince Andrew for showing ‘no remorse’
• Black Widow who ‘relished killing and had no regard for human life, even for children’: Griselda Blanco shot a child in the head when she was 11 and rose to be Miami’s drug kingpin. As she’s immortalised on Netflix, her son recalls his ‘fearsome’ mother

Local Journalism

Abi Whistance, Joshi Herrmann, Kate Knowles, Mollie Simpson, Jothi Gupta — Mill Media

• Special investigation: The collapsing world of Liverpool’s charity kingpin
• Investigation: The spectacular rise and sudden fall of Gurpaal Judge
• Exclusive: How did a semi in Harpurhey sell for £1.8m?

Richard Newman, Jennifer O’Leary, Gwyneth Jones, Chris Thornton — BBC Spotlight

• Katie: Coerced and Killed

Sam McBride — Belfast Telegraph

• Lough Neagh has become a scene of Biblical disaster, and Stormont was central to its destruction
• Killing Edgar podcast

Chris Burn — The Yorkshire Post

• Building societies scandal: Yorkshire victims reveal shocking stories – and plead for action to be taken
• Philips Trust: FCA got ‘Ponzi scheme’ warning on firm at heart of £138m building society scandal – 18 months before collapse
• Leeds, Newcastle and Nottingham Building Societies to pay tens of millions to Philips Trust victims

Jane Haynes — Birmingham Mail and Birmingham Mail/Post

• Teacher’s ‘life blown apart’ in onslaught of hate as false racism claim goes viral
• The truth exposed about ‘secretive’ council meeting on equal pay crisis in Birmingham
• ‘Like a prison’ – the tower block for homeless families that has 8pm curfew and no visitors allowed

Wendy Robertson — The Bridge

• The Bridge newsletter

Health & Life Sciences Journalism

Rebecca Thomas — The Independent

• Mental health patients ‘raped and sexually assaulted’ as NHS abuse scandal revealed
• Nicholas’s story: ‘I’ve been locked up for 10 years because I’m autistic. Is a chance at life too much to ask?’
• Revealed: NHS regulator’s ‘culture of fear’ that leaves rogue nurses free to abuse patients

Fin Johnston — The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

• Science for sale: Philip Morris’s web of payments to fund tobacco research
• Inside the strategy doc Philip Morris never meant you to see
• Tobacco state: why Japan was the perfect testing ground for Philip Morris

Hannah Barnes — The New Statesman

• The trauma ward
• The Cass Review into children’s gender care should shame us all
• Hundreds of doctors are challenging the BMA’s stance on puberty blockers

Robbie Boyd, Eamonn Matthews, Steve Grandison, Ian Bendelow, Sophie Borland, Katie O’Toole, Islay Stacey, Ali Watt, Frances Peters — Quicksilver Media for Channel 4 Dispatches

• Undercover A&E: NHS in Crisis

Ellie Pitt, Cree Haughton, Justina Simpson, Ellie Swinton, Patrick Russell, Liam Ayers — ITV News

• The Dark Side of Cosmetic Surgery

Martin Bagot — Daily Mirror

• Day in the life of a dentist – and why it’s nothing like you imagine as NHS nears collapse
• Britain’s dental health crisis exposed as hundreds of children in hospital with bad teeth
• Urgent warning amid fears cosmetic fillers could cause immune system problems

Hanna Geissler — Daily Express

• ‘I’m terminally ill – assisted dying must be legalised so my daughter won’t see me suffer’
• Assisted dying ‘allowed me to mostly forget’ fears, says Aussie man hit by brain tumour
• Dame Esther’s assisted dying petition delivered to Prime Minister’s doorstep

Crime & Legal Affairs Journalism

Sue Mitchell, Rob Lawrie, Joel Moors, Winifred Robinson, Dan Clarke, Philip Sellars, Tom Brignell, Mom Tudie — BBC

• To Catch a Scorpion
• How we found Europe’s most wanted migrant-smuggler
• Why the BBC could track down a people-smuggling kingpin before the police

Gabriel Pogrund, Katie Tarrant — The Sunday Times

• Millionaire’s ‘sex worker immigration scandal’
• Hamish Ogston: millionaire accused of exploiting women ‘set up charity to help win knighthood’
• Hamish Ogston: tycoon asked Met to arrest woman who accused him of sex trafficking

Mike Sullivan, Jerome Starkey, Mike Ridley — The Sun

• ‘Distraught’ Holly Willoughby under police guard after man is arrested over terrifying ‘kidnap plot’
• Police chief faces ‘Walter Mitty’ probe after being pictured wearing Falklands medal despite being 15 at time of war

Hannah Summers — The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

• Family Court Files: mother ‘devastated’ after rapist father granted contact with child
• Family Court Files: Psychologist’s evidence used to ‘ramp up’ allegations of parental alienation
• Kristoffer White: TBIJ wins court battle to publish name of sex offender

Rianna Croxford, Ruth Evans — BBC Panorama and BBC News

• Abercrombie & Fitch ex-CEO accused of exploiting men for sex
• Lawsuit accuses Abercrombie & Fitch of funding sex-trafficking operation
• FBI investigate after ex-Abercrombie boss sex claims

Isobel Yeung, Alex Nott, Esme Ash, Nick Parnes, Alistair Jackson, Matt Bardo, Sarah Wilson — Channel 4 Dispatches

• Britain’s Unsolved Crimewave: Dispatches

Comment Journalism

Daniel Finkelstein — The Times

• Israelis and Palestinians must start to listen
• Wes Streeting’s lessons from Richard Nixon and China
• Here’s the Keir Starmer I’ve known for decades

Matthew Syed — The Sunday Times

• When I was at school a teacher could call me the P-word. We’ve come so far
• The storm is gathering, and Europe is still dithering on defending itself
• Locked in by language, we are freed by music, poetry, painting … and love

Will Hayward — WalesOnline/The Will Hayward Newsletter

• The most pointless job in Wales
• The worst political leader in the UK
• Bluster, fluster and ‘word salad’ nonsense: Vaughan Gething ducks and weaves like a boxer at the Welsh Covid Inquiry

Kitty Donaldson — i

• Part political update, part group therapy: inside Starmer’s Cabinet meeting
• Grenfell is a tragic reminder to the Tories that regulation is not a dirty word
• The winter fuel row is a painful wake up call for new Labour MPs

Frances Ryan — The Guardian

• A summer defined by men killing women and girls. This can’t go on
• Think of this: a plan to ‘warehouse’ disabled people. What kind of nation is Britain becoming?
• Cropped out, banned, airbrushed: the school photos that show the ugly face of Britain today

Duncan Robinson — The Economist

• Why the next Westminster scandal is already here
• The narcissism of minor differences, Labour Party edition
• British boomers are losing out for the first time

Specialist Journalism

Peter Blackburn — The Doctor (by the British Medical Association)

• Nowhere left to turn
• Fears for patient care due to shortages of chronic alcohol misuse treatment Pabrinex
• Not the only failing

Lucinda Rouse, Emily Burt, Ollie Peart, Louise Hill, David Robinson, Rebecca Cooney, Andy Ricketts, Nav Pal, Til Owen — Third Sector

• The End of Charity podcast

Lucie Heath — i

• Revealed: Water firms dumped sewage 5,500 times in a year ‘illegally’
• Revealed: The hidden sewage spills damaging our national parks and beauty spots
• Toxic water, debt and sewage dumping: How Britain’s rivers got so bad

Deborah Cohen, Margaret McCartney — BMJ/Pharmaceutical Journal

• Inclisiran: the ‘extremely unusual’ political influence behind the novel drug’s approval
• Galleri promises to detect multiple cancers—but new evidence casts doubt on this much hyped blood test
• Inclisiran: Government’s strategy to promote cholesterol lowering drug after Brexit was “spectacular failure,” says insider

Lee Mottershead — Racing Post

• Revealed: the racehorse owner fronting an illegal bookmaker with more than 1,000 customers
• ‘People don’t want to provide bank statements. We’ve got so many people betting with us’

Jessica Hill — Schools Week

• The rise of the parent activist
• AI’s allure is proving hard to resist for the UK’s learners
• ‘Out of sight, out of mind’: The rise of unregistered alternative provision

Emily Townsend — Health Service Journal

• Over 30 sepsis deaths linked to ‘systemic’ failings, investigation reveals
• Revealed: Doubling of average waits for critical stroke treatments
• Midwives call women in labour ‘Asian princesses’ amid ‘hostile’ environment fears

Roya Nikkhah — The Sunday Times

• Prince Harry at 40: ‘All he does is spend time looking back’
• The hospital heart-to-hearts that brought Kate and King even closer
• Prince William to build houses for homeless on his land in Cornwall

Foreign Affairs Journalism

Christina Lamb — The Sunday Times

• Gun in hand, the Israeli settler tells the Palestinian: I will kill you
• First Hamas fighters raped her. Then they shot her in the head
• ‘Who will protect us?’: Christina Lamb on the Yazidis’ dangerous journey home

Alex Crawford — Sky News

• Libya floods: Child’s voice heard under rubble as rescue teams search desperately in Derna for survivors
• Warning of Islamic State’s growing resurgence – as Sky News gets rare access to terrorists’ families
• Report from Lebanon

Kim Sengupta — The Independent

• Bombs, betrayal and burying loved ones: Plight of one Ukraine village illustrates toll of Russia’s invasion
• ‘I have buried more than 50 friends’: My life as a British soldier fighting on Ukraine’s bloody front line
• The families of hostages taken by Hamas are desperate – but can Israel get them back?

Vanessa Bowles, Jaber Badwan — Channel 4 Dispatches

• Kill Zone: Inside Gaza

Louise Callaghan — The Sunday Times

• The secret city of tunnels where hundreds live below Vegas glitz
• Claudia Sheinbaum: Meet the woman ready to be Mexico’s first presidenta
• Stand-off at Eagle Pass: welcome to the epicentre of the US border crisis

Secunder Kermani — Channel 4 News

• Palestinian detainees allege torture and sexual abuse by Israeli captors
• Myanmar military forces victims to fight in brutal civil war

Gesbeen Mohammad, Brad Manning, Nechirvan Mando, Ghoncheh Habibiazad, Esella Hawkey, Tom Giles, Hafez — ITV

• Inside Iran: The Fight for Freedom

Stuart Ramsay, Dominique van Heerden, Toby Nash — Sky News

• Haiti gang boss will take part in talks if invited – but warns foreign forces will be treated as ‘invaders’
• Aboard ‘The Beast’: What do migrants face travelling through Mexico on way to US?
• Shocking scenes in Gaza hospital as IDF moves into Khan Younis | Israel-Hamas war

Arkady Ostrovsky — 1843 magazine, The Economist

• Life and death in Putin’s gulag
• Death and destruction in a Russian city
• Life and fate (podcast)

Technology Journalism, sponsored by Amazon

Alexander Martin — The Record from Recorded Future News

• Ransomware attacks hit record level in UK, according to neglected official data
• UK government urged to get on ‘forward foot’ with ransomware instead of ‘absorbing the punches’
• Exclusive: UK to propose mandatory reporting for ransomware attacks and licensing regime for all payments

Marianna Spring — BBC News

• The real story of the news website accused of fuelling riots
• Trump supporters target black voters with faked AI images
• X takes action on deepfake network smearing UK politicians after BBC investigation

Joe Tidy — BBC World Service

• ‘Pig butchering’ scammers target BBC reporter
• Sextortion warning: In six hours, my son was dead
• Stolen test data and NHS numbers published by hospital hackers

Amanda Chicago Lewis — 1843 magazine, The Economist

• Secrets of a ransomware negotiator

Cathy Newman, Job Rabkin, Emily Roe, Sophie Braybrook, Guy Basnett, Ed Howker — Channel 4 News

• Deepfake Porn

Helen Lewis — BBC Radio 4/BBC Sounds

• Helen Lewis Has Left the Chat

Energy & Environment Journalism, sponsored by Renewable UK

Sam McBride — Belfast Telegraph

• Apocalypse Neagh: The source of 40% of NI’s water is ‘dying’
• Watch: Sam McBride’s in-depth look at Lough Neagh’s blue-green algae crisis

Josephine Moulds — The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

• Backroom deals, mystery companies and a ‘killer lake’: inside DRC’s gas and oil auction
• HSBC helped oil and gas industry raise $47bn despite net-zero pledge
• Barclays’ billions of ‘sustainable’ finance for fossil fuel industry is greenwash, says investor

Esme Stallard, Becky Dale, Sophie Woodcock, Jonah Fisher, Libby Rogers — BBC News

• Water firms illegally spilled sewage on dry days – data suggests
• BBC uncovers 6,000 possible illegal sewage spills in one year

Rachel Salvidge, Leana Hosea — The Guardian/Watershed

• The Watershed Pollution Map
• Landfills across England could be leaking harmful toxic ooze, warn experts
• ‘It’s a poison and it’s killing us’: the hidden dangers of old UK landfills

Guy Grandjean, Patrick Fee, Gwyneth Jones, Chris Thornton — BBC Spotlight Northern Ireland

• Spotlight – The Lough Neagh Monster
• Hundreds of environmental breaches by Moy Park

Sofia Quaglia — The Guardian

• ‘If we can’t fish any more, we’re going to die’: the volunteer sea patrols protecting precious Philippine waters
• From sea to plate … to sea! Hong Kong puts oyster shells to new use
• ‘It smells so bad’: glut of wild salmon creates stink in Norway and Finland

Jess Staufenberg — SourceMaterial

• Trojan Horsepower – Formula 1 and the Saudi oil lobby
• F1 lobbies for Saudi against EU green rules

Arts & Entertainment Journalism

Mark Daly, Mona McAlinden, Shelley Jofre, Jax Sinclair, Karen Wightman, Hayley Hassall — BBC Panorama

• The Dark Side of Ballet Schools

Jonathan Dean — The Times and The Sunday Times

• Oasis reunion and Wembley gigs next year … is that definitely, maybe?
• Ridley Scott: I didn’t need historians to make my Napoleon epic
• Olly Alexander on Eurovision: ‘I was trying not to have a breakdown’

Rachael Healy — The Guardian and Observer

• ‘At the start you get molested and by 45 you’re too old to work’ – the secret misery of women working in TV
• Fresh crisis at ‘toxic’ Strictly as ex-staff claim they faced sexualised comments and cruelty
• ‘The outrageousness of what Louis CK did is totally lost’: the film about the backlash faced by his accusers

Tom Bryant — Daily Mirror

• BBC’s Huw Edwards scandal teen breaks silence in first interview – ‘I felt groomed’
• Huw Edwards scandal teen: Why I first tried to protect BBC star but now feel shame
• Paul O’Grady’s beloved dog nuzzled star’s shoulder as devoted husband battled to save him

Lucy Osborne, Stephanie Kirchgaessner — The Guardian and Observer

• ‘I honest to God believe I was drugged’: magician David Copperfield’s alleged victims speak out
• The FBI investigated David Copperfield for two years. The claim that he was ‘exonerated’ was widely embraced. Was he?
• ‘Magic David called’: David Copperfield repeatedly contacted Jeffrey Epstein

Clemmie Moodie, Hannah Hope, Scarlet Howes — The Sun

• Strictly pro Giovanni Pernice probed over serious complaints by 3 ‘traumatised’ contestants as BBC ‘gathers evidence’
• Strictly Come Dancing bosses make huge changes to show after Giovanni Pernice quits
• Strictly bombshell as Amanda Abbington demands backstage footage of her and Giovanni as she is diagnosed with PTSD

Carolyn Atkinson, Olivia Skinner — BBC Radio 4 Front Row

• The British Museum’s missing gems
• Painting stolen in art heist more than 30 years ago returned to Glasgow museum

Rosamund Urwin, Charlotte Wace — The Times and The Sunday Times

• Russell Brand accused of rape, sexual assaults and abuse
• How The Times and The Sunday Times investigated Russell Brand
• ‘I felt used and abused’ on Arthur: alleged Russell Brand victim speaks

New Journalist of the Year

Rafe Uddin — Financial Times

• Labour loses Muslim support over stance on Israel-Hamas ceasefire
• Reform UK’s unusual structure with Nigel Farage in the middle
• How Post Office lawyers pushed boundaries in UK sub-postmasters scandal

Sammy Gecsoyler — The Guardian

• ‘We’re going to see people dying on the streets’: homeless refugee crisis grips Liverpool
• ‘Rat bites and chronic asthma’: schools on frontline of UK housing crisis
• Met police agree six-figure payout to student hit by baton at protest

Kaf Okpattah — ITV News, ITV News London

• Whistleblower reveals corruption and collusion inside Wandsworth Prison
• The fraud scammers putting people out of pocket by cloning phone numbers

Simar Bajaj — The Guardian, New Scientist

• Everyone is on their phones. But is it really phone addiction we’re experiencing?
• The surprising mental health and brain benefits of weight-loss drugs
• He was shot in the throat. Now he saves gun victims as a trauma surgeon in Baltimore

Nimra Shahid — The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

• Santander arranged billion-dollar oil bond after making green pledge
• Santander weakened fossil fuel policy after raising billions for gas projects

Venetia Menzies — The Sunday Times

• Anxiety drug pregabalin killed my son — and hundreds more are dying from it
• The company taking refugees out of Gaza — and ‘making millions’
• After the earthquake: how Morocco is rebuilding

Oliver Marsden — The Sunday Times/Al Jazeera

• Hero taxi driver who saved scores from Hamas faces hatred from both sides
• Dodging Israeli rockets with Ghana’s UN peacekeepers
• Israeli strikes on Lebanon: Attacks are causing wildfires across south

Yasmin Rufo — BBC News

• London mayor election: Bots, misleading URLs cause voter confusion
• Ulez expansion: Contested claims examined
• Ulez: More than 300 cameras damaged or stolen in four months

Sports Journalism

Jacob Whitehead — The Athletic

• Special report: Newcastle United sponsor Noon and shocking allegations of worker mistreatment
• Saudi Arabia investigates worker mistreatment allegations after The Athletic report on Newcastle sponsor Noon
• Special report: ‘Disturbing’ safety issues at Hillsborough 35 years after disaster

Oliver Brown — The Telegraph

• Angela Carini was sent unforgivably into harm’s way by gutless IOC cowards
• After my grandfather hugged Jesse Owens, the Nazis told him: ‘Never embrace a black man again’
• Michael Vaughan: If I had gone through this racism ordeal at 80, I would have wanted to be shot

Simon Lock, Rob Davies, Jacob Steinberg — The Bureau of Investigative Journalism / The Guardian

• Abramovich’s hidden football deals during Chelsea’s time at the top (TBIJ) and Chelsea FC face new questions over how Roman Abramovich funded success (Guardian)
• ‘I worked for Abramovich?’: footballers were owned by oligarch via offshore deals (TBIJ) and Revealed: Abramovich, the super-agent and the footballers owned as ‘commodities’ (Guardian)
• Leaked documents reveal Abramovich is still connected to Vitesse (TBIJ) and Abramovich loans fund owner of Dutch football club, leaked documents suggest (Guardian)

Jacob Judah — 1843 magazine, The Economist

• The strange case of the disappearing football team

Riath Al-Samarrai — Daily Mail

• Drifting through life without gold medals, tortured by his past, and now claims of bankruptcy… How did petulant Wiggins fall so spectacularly from his golden bike?
• Seb Coe explains why he’s HAPPY to break 128 years of Olympic tradition by handing out cash for gold… and reveals Roman Abramovich’s unlikely role in athletics
• The curious case of Jade Jones’ drugs test and why the Chinese might be quick to ask questions, writes RIATH AL-SAMARRAI

Ian Herbert — Daily Mail

• Looting and rioting, setting fire to police officers and hunting down English fans… fearful European clubs are turning a blind eye to shadowy leaders of their untouchable ultras
• Thirty-five years after horror of the Hillsborough tragedy, Mail Sport can reveal that incredibly the stadium is still not fit for purpose with poor stewarding, inadequate turnstiles and a problem tunnel
• Grubby, classless, the five-year legal battle over plane crash victim Emiliano Sala takes us into football’s sewers… where players are pawns and chronically inept clubs desperately try to save cash

Matt Lawton — The Times

• Man City launch unprecedented legal action against Premier League
• ‘The horror is everywhere’ – inside Lord Coe’s secret trip to Ukraine
• Russian athletes should be allowed at Olympics, says government

Um-E-Aymen Babar — Sky Sports

• How does endometriosis affect women in sport?
• USA cricket teen on tackling social media trolls, South Asian heritage and 2028 Olympic goals
• Um-E-Aymen Babar ok Tiktok

Campaign of the Year

Caroline Wheeler —The Sunday Times: Bloody Disgrace

• Thousands dead, 40 years of cover-up: time for justice for infected blood victims
• At last: promise of £10bn payout for infected blood victims
• Jeremy Hunt: I promised a dying friend I’d end infected blood scandal

Patrick Butler, Josh Halliday, John Domokos — The Guardian: Unpaid Carers

• Carers threatened with prosecution over minor breaches of UK benefit rules
• ‘Injustice’: 92-year-old with dementia told by DWP to repay £7k in disability allowance
• I’m under attack and fighting back: the scandal trapping carers

Computer Weekly editorial team — Computer Weekly: Post Office Scandal

• Post Office Horizon scandal explained: Everything you need to know
• Fujitsu staff instructed how to bid for government contracts during self-imposed ban
• Post Office Horizon replacement project labelled ‘unachievable’ as taxpayer bill reaches £1bn

David Cohen — Evening Standard: Show Respect

• Boys, porn and the alarming way they talk about girls – a special investigation
• School pupils tell how they are victims of sexual harassment every day
• Show some respect: Standard launches campaign with £500k to tackle sexist abuse in schools

Lucie Heath — i: Save Britain’s Rivers

• Save Britain’s Rivers: i challenges all parties to commit to election manifesto
• Revealed: The hidden sewage spills damaging our national parks and beauty spots
• National Trust signs up to i’s Save Britain’s Rivers manifesto

Hanna Geissler, Giles Sheldrick — Daily Express: Give Us Our Last Rights

• My assisted dying petition proves Brits are compassionate – now Rishi Sunak must act
• ‘I’m terminally ill – assisted dying must be legalised so my daughter won’t see me suffer’
• Assisted dying debate must move on to how law will change, MND campaigner says

Amy Clare Martin — The Independent: IPP Jail Sentences

• Revealed: 16 years in prison for stealing a bike and no hope of release – as 7 trapped in jail kill themselves
• ‘He looked like a starving dog on the floor’: Prisoner trapped on indefinite jail term driven to hunger strike
• Father imprisoned for 12 years for stealing mobile phone under ‘cruel’ indefinite jail term reunited with son

Martin Bagot, Jason Beattie — Daily Mirror: Save NHS Dentistry

• Dentists warn ‘rescue plan’ will fail to end crisis as 60,000 people sign our petition
• Day in the life of a dentist – and why it’s nothing like you imagine as NHS nears collapse
• Britain’s dental health crisis exposed as hundreds of children in hospital with bad teeth

Photojournalism

Thomas Dworzak — 1843 magazine, The Economist

André Luís Alves — 1843 magazine, The Economist

Giles Clarke — CNN Digital

Nichole Sobecki — 1843 magazine, The Economist

Dimitris Legakis — Athena Picture Agency

Stefan Rousseau — PA Media

Hannah McKay — Reuters

Interviewer of the Year

Alice Thomson — The Times

• Ed Davey: ‘Being a carer is harder than being a politician’
• Peter Kyle: It was 5am. A woman said, ‘Your partner is dead ’
• Emma Barnett: ‘The pain was so bad, I was losing the will to live’

Christina Lamb — The Sunday Times

• ICC prosecutor: UK didn’t blitz the IRA — Israel needs that restraint
• The president’s daughter (and Instagram star) wanted by Interpol
• David Cameron: ‘Why did I take the job? Rishi Sunak asked!’

Laura Kuenssberg — Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, BBC News

• Baroness Mone and the PPE Scandal
• How Can We Protect Our Children Online?
• Inside No 11 with Chancellor Rachel Reeves

Charlotte Edwardes — The Guardian

• ‘You asked me questions I’ve never asked myself’: Keir Starmer’s most personal interview yet
• ‘Dismissing global warming? That was a joke’: Jeremy Clarkson on fury, farming and why he’s a changed man
• ‘The levels of attack are extraordinary’: Gary Lineker on punditry, podcasts – and why he won’t stop speaking his mind

Nick Ferrari — LBC

• Labour leader Keir Starmer joins Nick Ferrari to take your calls
• Champagne and caviar: Esther Rantzen reveals plans for final moments as she pushes for assisted dying law change
• Nigel Farage joins Nick Ferrari

Samantha Poling — BBC

• How I confronted Emma Caldwell’s killer
• Catching a Killer: The Murder of Emma Caldwell
• Who Killed Emma?

Piers Morgan — Piers Morgan Uncensored

• “Richard Gadd is PSYCHOTIC” Baby Reindeer’s ‘Real’ Martha Fiona Harvey
• Kevin Spacey Breaks Down As He Faces Debt Of MILLIONS
• Piers Morgan vs Rishi Sunak Round 2 | Prime Minister Discusses Israel-Hamas War, NHS, Rwanda & More

Paul Brand — ITV News

• Interview with Rishi Sunak
• Interview with Ed Davey
• Interview with Keir Starmer

(View all three interviews here)

Politics Journalism

Jim Pickard, Anna Gross — Financial Times

• Keir Starmer accepted £76,000 of freebies including tickets to over 20 football games
• Keir Starmer faces backlash over early failure to disclose £16,200 in donor-funded clothing
• Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves declared clothing donations as office support

Pippa Crerar — The Guardian

• Kemi Badenoch accused of ‘bullying and traumatising’ staff
• Rishi Sunak aide placed bet on election date days before announcement
• Tories putting party reputation before sexual assault claim, says alleged victim

Rowena Mason, Henry Dyer, Matthew Weaver — The Guardian

• Biggest Tory donor said looking at Diane Abbott makes you ‘want to hate all black women’
• ‘No room for the Indians?’: Tory donor Frank Hester suggested staff climb on train roof
• Revealed: Sunak flown to Leeds for private tour of Frank Hester’s office weeks after £5m donation

Job Rabkin, Darshna Soni, Ed Gove, Saif Aledros, Georgina Lee, Lee Sorrell — Channel 4 News

• Undercover Inside Reform’s Campaign

Beth Rigby — Sky News

• Election exit poll
• The Battle for Number 10: A Sky News Leaders’ Special
• How Reform fares on Thursday will also determine the Conservatives fate

Caroline Wheeler — The Sunday Times

• Commons worker arrested after allegedly spying for China
• My MP husband Andrew Bridgen was captured by antivax ‘cult’
• At last: promise of £10bn payout for infected blood victims

Jane Merrick — i

• Thousands of disabled people died after ‘Covid treatment withheld’, inquiry to probe
• ‘My daughter was allowed to die of Covid because she had Down’s syndrome’
• Labour manifesto missing pensioners’ winter fuel and bus pass pledges

Steven Swinford — The Times

• Britain and US launch airstrikes on Houthi targets
• Jeremy Hunt looks for £9bn to balance his budget
• Teachers and nurses should get above-inflation pay rise, ministers told

Business, Finance and Economics Journalism, sponsored by Starling Bank

Simon Murphy — Daily Mirror & Sunday Mirror

• Fujitsu boss lives on ‘blood money’ with £2m mansion as we suffer, says Post Office victim
• Provider boasting of ‘compassion’ threatens daughter with court action over £50k care bill for her 93-year-old amputee mother with dementia
• Mirror tracks down former Post Office IT chief that Horizon inquiry insisted couldn’t be found

Ed Conway — Sky News

• Surge in sale of UK-made cars to Russia’s neighbours shows how it’s beating sanctions
• British firms’ exports are almost certainly bolstering Russia’s war machine in Ukraine, Sky data analysis finds
• How British financial services aid sale of Russian gas on European market | Ukraine War

Tom Bergin — Reuters

• Online-gambling giants conquer U.S. with tactics deemed too tough for Britain

Gill Plimmer, Robert Smith — Financial Times

• Chinese state banks are lenders to Thames Water’s parent company
• Thames Water owners pile group with debt
• Thames Water shareholders backed away over regulator’s debt demands

Siddharth Philip, Benedikt Kammel, Anthony Palazzo, Katharine Gemmell, Sabah Meddings — Bloomberg News

• Bogus Supplier of Jet-Engine Parts May Have Faked Employees Too
• Ghost in the Machine: How Fake Parts Infiltrated Airline Fleets
• UK Fraud Cops Make Arrest in Fake Airplane Parts Scandal

Anna Isaac, Alex Lawson — The Guardian

• Sellafield apologises after guilty plea over string of cybersecurity failings
• Nuclear Narnia: why is Sellafield Europe’s most dangerous industrial site?
• Sellafield nuclear site hacked by groups linked to Russia and China

Danny Fortson — The Sunday Times

• Mike Lynch: Flown to the US in chains, now he is free … and talking
• Inside Mike Lynch’s last stand as $11bn fraud trial looms
• The app that promised an NHS ‘revolution’ then went down in flames

Online Video Journalism

Alex Rothwell, Alastair Good, Yasmin Butt, Pauline Den Hartog Jager, Jack Feeney, Federica De Caria, Kasia Sobocinska, Stephanie Bosset — The Times and The Sunday Times

• Russell Brand accused of rape, sexual assaults and abuse | Investigation
• Undercover in a British prison: security flaws exposed | Times Investigation
• ‘Illegal’ conspiracy theory school exposed | Times Investigation

Andrew Harding — BBC News

• BBC tracks down smuggler behind Channel crossing which killed Sara, 7

Mohamed Ibrahim, Owen Pinnel, Mouna Ba, Wael El-Saadi, Feras Al Ajrami — BBC Eye Investigations

• Gaza 101: Emergency Rescue

Tom Pettifor, Matthew Young, Daniel Dove — Daily Mirror

• Has the man who killed Jill Dando finally been found?
• Jill Dando murder: Man wanted for questioning matches features of Serbian assassin
• Jill Dando murder: Key witness identifies Serbian assassin

Lucinda Herbert, Iain Lynn — National World Video

• Lured To Her Death: The Murder of Sasha Marsden

Reem Makhoul, Robert Leslie, Clancy Morgan, Amelia Kosciulek, Matilda Hay, Liz Kraker, Dorian Barranco, Barbara Corbellini Duarte, Erica Berenstein, Yasser Abu Wazna — Business Insider

• 4 Gazans show how war devastated their coastline

Piers Morgan — Piers Morgan Uncensored

• “Richard Gadd is PSYCHOTIC” Baby Reindeer’s ‘Real’ Martha Fiona Harvey

Ben Marino, Joe Sinclair, Veronica Kan-Dapaah, Petros Gioumpasis, Greg Bobillot — Financial Times

• Chinese brokers launder hundreds of millions for global crime groups | FT Film

Investigation of the Year

Scarlet Howes, Mike Hamilton, Alex West — The Sun

• Ex-BBC presenter Huw Edwards charged with making 37 indecent images of children, ‘shared on WhatsApp’
• Huw Edwards used position of power to groom young people for 6 years even sending pictures from BBC desk to impress them
• We’re still suffering, say parents at centre of Huw Edwards scandal as they slam BBC for lack of answers after he quits

Rosamund Urwin, Charlotte Wace, Paul Morgan-Bentley, Esella Hawkey, Imogen Wynell Mayow, Alice McShane, Florence Kennard, Ian Bendelow, Victoria Noble, Alistair Jackson, Sarah Wilson, Geraldine McKelvie — The Sunday Times, The Times, Hardcash Productions, Channel Four Dispatches Investigations Unit

• Russell Brand accused of rape, sexual assaults and abuse
• How The Times and The Sunday Times investigated Russell Brand
• Russell Brand: In Plain Sight

Alex Thomson, Nanette van der Laan — Channel 4 News

• Post Office Scandal

Paul Morgan-Bentley — The Times

• I worked undercover in one of UK’s most dangerous jails — without checks
• My son died in HMP Bedford. I never felt he was safe there
• Undercover in a British prison: security flaws exposed | Times Investigation

Ruth Evans, Oliver Newlan, Leo Telling, Sasha Hinde, Hayley Clarke, Karen Wightman — BBC Panorama

• Undercover School: Cruelty in the Classroom

Job Rabkin, Darshna Soni, Ed Gove, Saif Aledros, Georgina Lee, Lee Sorrell — Channel 4 News

• Undercover Inside Reform’s Campaign

Holly Bancroft, May Bulman, Monica C. Camacho, Fahim Abed — The Independent and Lighthouse Reports

• At last! Afghan special forces heroes set for sanctuary in UK after government U-turn
• MoD accused of burying admission that UK special forces had power over Afghan sanctuary claims
• Murdered, tortured or in hiding from the Taliban: The special forces abandoned by Britain

Daniel Hewitt, Imogen Barrer, Isabel Alderson-Blench, John Ray — ITV News: The Post Office Tapes

• New secret tape reveals top Post Office lawyer was warned of ‘wrongful’ convictions decade ago
• Secret tape shows Paula Vennells was told about problems with Horizon and warned not to cover it up
• Paula Vennells’ ‘smoking gun’ email reveals Post Office ‘cover-up’

Rowena Mason, Henry Dyer, Matthew Weaver — The Guardian

• Biggest Tory donor said looking at Diane Abbott makes you ‘want to hate all black women’
• No yawning or fingerprints on doors: the strict rules at Tory donor’s firm
• Revealed: Sunak flown to Leeds for private tour of Frank Hester’s office weeks after £5m donation

Samantha Poling, Eamon T. O Connor, Anton Ferrie, Shelley Jofre — BBC Disclosure

• Catching a Killer: The Murder of Emma Caldwell

Scoop of the Year

Russell Brand accused of rape, sexual assaults and abuse — The Sunday Times, The Times, Hardcash Productions and Channel 4 Dispatches

Huw Edwards Huw Edwards charged with making 37 indecent images of children, ‘shared on WhatsApp’ — The Sun

Naked photos sent in WhatsApp ‘phishing’ attacks on UK MPs and staff— Politico

No 10 pass for Labour donor who gave £500,000 — The Sunday Times

Labour will add 20% VAT to private school fees within first year of winning power — i

The Nottingham Attacks: A Search for Answers — BBC Panorama

Innovation

Harry Lewis-Irlam, Stephen Matthews, Darren Boyle, Rhodri Morgan — Mail Online: Deep Dive

• Anatomy of a loveless landslide: How Labour won on apathy and division
• Hour by hour, how D-Day unfolded…
• How China could seize Taiwan and spark WW3

Laura Dunn, Katie Lilley-Harris, Ellie Senior, Sherree Younger, Scott Nicholson, Jamie Mckerrow Maxwell — KL Magazine

• Rocky Bottoms
• Johnny Cave’s Asparagus
• Archangel Distilleries

Niels de Hoog, Antonio Voce, Elena Morresi, Manisha Ganguly, Ashley Kirk — The Guardian

• How war destroyed Gaza’s neighbourhoods – visual investigation

Alison Killing, Chris Miller, Peter Andringa, Chris Campbell, Sam Learner, Sam Joiner — Financial Times

• FT investigation finds Ukrainian children on Russian adoption sites

David Dubas-Fisher, Cullen Willis, Paul Gallagher, Richard Ault — Reach Data Unit

• DWP Cold Weather Payment postcode checker – map shows where households are due £25, £50 or £75 boost
• Enter postcodes in this map to see average house prices in your area
• Cheapest places in Greater Manchester to buy petrol as RAC issues fuel price warning

Gabriel Pogrund, Emanuele Midolo, Venetia Menzies, Darren Burchett, Narottam Medhora, Cecilia Tombesi — The Sunday Times

• The dead teenager, the lying suspect and the black box that proves it

The post British Journalism Awards 2024: Full list of this year’s finalists appeared first on Press Gazette.

DMG Media‘s venture capital arm, DMG Ventures, has made new investments in two food and drink companies: cacao pod “upcycling” company Blue Stripes and cannabidoil (CBD) product manufacturer Trip.

The investments, of undisclosed size, come as DMG Ventures announced the launch of two new £25m funds: a “Headline Fund” designed to back “consumer-facing start-ups from Seed to Series A” and a “Scale Fund” that it says will help more established consumer brands “accelerate their growth” through partnerships with DMG Media titles.

DMG Media publishes newsbrands including the Daily Mail, Mail Online, Metro, the i and the New Scientist.

DMG Ventures launched in 2018 and says it has since invested in 29 consumer-facing start-ups including electric toothbrush brand SURI, racing simulator F1 Arcade and money management app Plum. Keeping with DMG Ventures’ pledge to support companies it invests in with exposure on DMG Media titles, SURI and Plum have been written up on Mail Online in both straight ad content and product reviews.

Pure Stripes manufactures drinks and food using whole cacao pods, which it says differentiates itself from typical chocolate companies which waste “70% of the cacao pod” by only using the beans.

Trip meanwhile describes itself as the UK’s “#1 CBD brand” and is best known for its tins of CBD-infused drinks, which are widely available in high street shops. Although it can be extracted from cannabis (as well as hemp) CBD is legal.

Trip suggests its products can help promote calm and reduce anxiety and stress, although a review of Trip products on Mail Online earlier this year reported no obvious change in stress levels after using the products.

Manuel Lopo de Carvalho, the managing partner at DMG Ventures, said: “We’re delighted to launch two new funds to support the most exciting entrepreneurs in Europe and the US.

“Thanks to our unique investment strategy, we are ideally placed to seize opportunities from what we believe will be a transformational shift in the consumer sector.”

Rachel Muzyczka, a newly-promoted partner at the company, added: “We’re really looking forward to working with Trip and Blue Stripes, which are two of the best emerging food and beverage brands globally. Trip is among the most outstanding startups we have seen, while Blue Stripes’ team is second to none.

“We will put the full weight of DMGT’s media brands – and their vast global audience – behind Trip and Blue Stripes.”

The post Daily Mail publisher invests in CBD drinks and cacao ‘upcycling’ companies appeared first on Press Gazette.

The editor of Mail Online is becoming publisher and chief executive of its parent company amid a shake-up to its leadership structure.

DMG Media said it is preparing for continued digital innovation and further change amounting to “significant structural transformation” in the news industry.

Mail Online publisher and editor-in-chief Danny Groom, who has been in his current roles for two years, will oversee DMG Media’s publishing, product development and commercial operations.

The publisher also owns Metro, the i newspaper and the New Scientist.

Current CEO Rich Caccappolo will become vice chairman of DMG Media, with a brief to focus on “strategic initiatives pivotal to the future of news publishing”.

Caccappolo said: “I believe our industry is on the brink of a significant structural transformation, which should ensure the long-term sustainability of publishers that invest in great journalism.

“We have a powerful brand, strong operating performance and an owner with a long-term vision, which have helped us drive these changes. It is crucial that we seize these opportunities as they arise.

“The chairman has asked me to focus on opportunities for our company and the industry, and I am honoured to lead this charge.”

Groom will be succeeded overseeing Mail Online by Ted Verity, editor of Mail Newspapers since November 2021 and former Mail on Sunday editor and Daily Mail deputy. Verity will become editor-in-chief of the Daily Mail across all platforms.

Reporting to DMG Media chairman and proprietor Lord Rothermere, the publisher said Groom and Verity will together “accelerate the Mail’s digital transformation, deliver exciting new products, maximise our editorial firepower and grow our audience on existing and new platforms”.

Already this year Mail Online has launched a partial paywall, meaning ten to 15 “premium” stories a day are only for subscribers. Mail Plus costs £1.99 per month for the first year and then £6.99 monthly.

Vere Harmsworth appointed DMG Media chief commercial officer

Also announced was the appointment of Lord Rothermere’s son Vere Harmsworth as chief commercial officer. The company’s heir apparent was previously appointed in the newly-created role of director of publishing strategy in May last year and before that was working in business development for the publisher.

Harmsworth will be supported by deputy chief executive James Welsh, who will also take on an expanded role covering Metro, DMG’s US and Irish businesses, and its print, legal, HR and finance operations.

Lord Rothermere, who took parent company DMGT private in 2021, said: “We are committed to accelerating digital innovation at DMG Media. For more than 125 years, we have adapted and thrived through a series of seismic changes, and today our audience is larger and more diverse than it has ever been.”

He said Caccappolo’s leadership will be “vital to navigating the future of our industry”, adding: “We stand on the cusp of further change, and I am confident that our brands will continue to captivate readers, viewers and listeners under Danny’s and Ted’s leadership.

“Thanks to his experience running a successful digital newsroom, and his strong team-building skills, Danny is ideally qualified for his new role.

“Ted is an exceptionally talented editor with an acute understanding of the Mail and its readers. Under his leadership, the Mail will continue to create the world-class journalism that informs and delights readers everywhere.”

Groom said the company is preparing to “embrace a new set of digital challenges and opportunities” and “continue creating more innovative products for our users and advertisers”.

While Verity added: “With our unrivalled team of journalists and executives – and determination to produce the kind of journalism we know our audience wants to read – I see no reason why the Mail can’t become a dominant global media brand.”

The post Mail leadership shake-up as Mail Online boss becomes CEO appeared first on Press Gazette.

Upmarket UK newsbrands are far less likely to link through to the work of their colleagues at other publishers than tabloid news sites, new Press Gazette research suggests.

Press Gazette assessed recent output from nine leading UK news websites to establish how often they include a hyperlink when repeating information sourced from other publishers.

In the snapshot survey we found that the Mirror and The Sun were the most likely to link to other publishers, doing so in eight out of ten stories assessed at each site.

The Times, Financial Times and Telegraph, on the other hand, each only linked to another news site in one of the ten articles analysed at each and appear to have taken editorial policy decision not to link.

The Guardian and BBC, meanwhile, appeared to link through to their sources slightly less often than not.

Mail Online linked to publisher sources in the majority of articles and the Express in half of the examples we found.

The overall picture is of an industry that routinely avoids linking to sources when lifting information from other sites.

Press Gazette searched each publisher for articles published in recent weeks that featured the word “reported” (i.e. “The New York Times reported…”) and selected from the results the first ten stories that carried information copied from a named third-party news outlet.

Because the research only looked at articles that disclosed they were citing another news outlet, this research does not account for the overall frequency with which the publishers credit their sources: uncredited rewrites of a competitor’s story, for example, would not be picked up in the analysis.

Across all the publishers assessed internal links to other parts of their own websites were common. Many of the publishers would also credit information to "local media" when describing something that had been reported overseas, without identifying or linking to the source.

The Mirror told Press Gazette that it is supportive of linking and that the two articles in which no external link had been inserted were the result of human error.

A spokesperson for The Sun, similarly, said: "The Sun has always been known for breaking great exclusives and we have long campaigned for publishers to receive recognition for their original journalism.

“Alongside expecting to receive this attribution we in turn make every attempt to ensure that we attribute other publications' good stories that we have picked up."

The BBC’s operating licence requires the corporation to link to relevant third parties in its online output, and in its most recent “Delivering our Mission and Public Purposes" report it said that, in a sample of 1,370 articles published across the BBC News and BBC Sport websites, 18% of its output had linked to another media organisation. The BBC declined to comment.

Mail Online declined to comment. The Guardian also declined to comment, but pointed Press Gazette to its editorial code, which instructs its journalists that material "obtained from another organisation should be acknowledged".

The Times, FT and Telegraph had not responded to a request for comment at time of publication.

What's best practice on linking to other news sites?

Gavin Allen, a digital journalism lecturer at Cardiff University’s School of Journalism and a former associate editor at Mirror.co.uk, said there can be a “double incentive” for news sites not to link to competitors: “On the one hand, you're saying ‘we didn't break the story, someone else did’ which may be bad for reputation.

“On the other hand, you're pointing readers away from your website,” which he said may lead them to click away.

Materially, Allen said traffic from backlinks is often “vanishingly small”. Instead, he said, the way un-linked re-reports “might start to cannibalise your traffic is if it’s attracting search away”.

He said: “It’s more a courtesy and an ethics thing as well, I think… If you’re doing stuff based on other people’s work then you should be crediting that work. That would be good practice.”

Search engine optimisation orthodoxy holds that Google gives better rankings to articles that link to relevant third-party websites.

The Association of Online Publishers offers the following guidance on this topic: "Fair attribution is vital to help publishers get credit for the time, money, and effort they put into sourcing, investigating, and producing original content.

"As well as helping direct users to the original source of a story, linking is vitally important for SEO. Google uses links from ‘prominent websites’ as a signal to determine ‘authoritativeness’ – a key factor in determining ranking."

The AOP invites publishers to sign up to the Link Attribution Protocol, a group of publishers who agree to follow best practice on linking and who share a single email point of contact for getting links added to stories.

Scroll down for the full linking results from each of the nine publishers

The post Missing links: Upmarket UK newsbrands deny click-throughs to story sources appeared first on Press Gazette.

Can publishers cope with being software companies?

This was the question experts addressed at Press Gazette’s Future of Media Technology Conference on a panel about the role tech plays in finding new revenue streams.

Senior leaders from The Times, Haymarket and the Mail shared their insights on using tech to reduce subscriber churn, sell corporate subscriptions and introduce a partial paywall.

Payal Sood, director of technology at Haymarket Media Group which has built new products as it moves away from a reliance on advertising revenue towards subscriptions and corporate customers in particular, said she likes “going for a build option” where possible.

“For Haymarket, we have built our own CMS,” she said. “Of course, we are not a software company, but we partner with the software developers to build the way we would like things to work.

“The CMS is quite core to create our content and give the editorial the workflow they would like and it also gives us the scale because at Haymarket we keep relaunching our brands, we keep acquiring new brands, and we do launch new brands as well.

“If we are on somebody else’s platform then it’s difficult, and sometimes it’s not even economically viable, because you are just launching a new brand which may not be generating that much revenue to start with, but you’re paying the same amount in the SaaS [software as a service] platform.”

Sood added: “We have got a single platform and our smaller brands also get the same enriched platform features which our bigger brands are getting. So for us, it makes more sense to keep building and keep upgrading that CMS.”

Sood said the key principle at Haymarket for answering the build or buy question is: “If it is core to your business: build, or at least have the complete control over your systems and your data. You don’t want somebody sunsetting the system you are working on and the customer data platform you have just migrated.”

‘Having great partners is the way you get success’

Mail product director Simon Regan-Edwards said: “My view: always buy, although we’ve built quite a lot of stuff… But I would say look for great partners.

“Having great partners who have invariably done this before you, and working closely with them, is the way you get success.”

In response to Sood’s point about software businesses sunsetting a product, Regan-Edwards responded that “you can also have internal employees who give three months’ notice and suddenly you’ve got an unsupported platform. So there is a downside.”

But he agreed that the crucial point is deciding “what is differentiated and core to your business, and then yes, you may have to go and build that yourself if you’re big enough and it can be supported, but that total cost of ownership is often higher than you think it is.”

Regan-Edwards also emphasised the importance of a “cross-functional, co-located working team within editorial”.

When rolling out the Mail+ partial paywall on Mail Online at the start of the year, making about ten to 15 stories a day available to paying subscribers only, Regan-Edwards said they brought together marketing, product and tech people to sit together with the journalists in the newsroom.

“I think having that connection between editorial, product and tech, working directly with your preferred partners – that is the glue, that is the secret sauce.”

Times focus is on churn reduction and mobile performance

Edward Roussel, head of digital at The Times and Sunday Times, agreed on the importance of cross-functional teams.

He said the success of The Times is “at the intersection of three things. It’s, first of all, brilliant journalism, so thinking very deeply about every story needs to be distinctive and differentiated and needs to perform well on a mobile device.

“Secondly, I think it’s about the newsroom working very closely with the product team and with the marketing team, because if that connective tissue isn’t working well, it’s like a three-legged stool. If one element doesn’t work, then you’re not going to be able to continue to build your audience and build your subscriber base.

“And I think the most important thing from a business point of view, is churn reduction. So what are the elements that ensure that you can retain those hard won subscribers?”

On that point he revealed there is a “very strong correlation between daily habit, getting people to come back every day, if not every day certainly every other day, and the propensity to churn. So if people come back more than 16 times in a month, what we see in our data is propensity to churn drops off dramatically.

“And so to that end, we work very hard on getting people to use our app, because if you use our app, propensity to churn drops by about 50%.

“We work very hard on getting you to subscribe to a newsletter because if you subscribe to a newsletter, the propensity to churn drops by about 11%.

“And we look at other ways, like puzzles is a big thing for us, and if you’re what’s known as a solver and do the crypto crossword, the propensity to churn drops by 22%.”

The Times has “completely modernised” its newsroom including a new website CMS, Roussel revealed, which includes elements like AI headline suggestions and easier mobile optimisation via dragging and dropping elements of a story.

He said this meant people can “now focus on the journalism, as opposed to manipulating complicated bits of software”.

But of the creation of this tech, Roussel said: “We’re very much of the view that we should not be a software company.

“Candidly, when we were trying to do our own software, we were really bad at it, and that was clarifying. So we select tools that we then integrate and augment.

“But that in itself is a skill by selecting the right providers, the right suppliers: augmenting their off the shelf products to make them more relevant to how we operate is in itself a skill and not to be dismissed and we need very talented technology and product teams to be able to do that.”

Publishers ‘need to decide if they want to be software companies’

Stewart Robinson, managing director of web and app software company Full Fat Things, said publishers “need to decide whether they want to be software companies.

“It’s a bit scary to become a software company and to grow all that skill. And there are many phrases like ‘we are all developers now’ as we look to just embrace every technology that led you to do more and more and more. But is it something core to the business? Is it something that they really want to do? And I would say that as someone who sells software, but I genuinely think there’s something there. “

Robinson added: “I think the great challenge for the publishing industry is having really good glue between your systems, not just making them connect, but making your data flow across all of your systems in a meaningful way.”

The post Winning technology strategies shared by Times, Mail and Haymarket appeared first on Press Gazette.

Publishers have been urged to “band together” to challenge big tech’s power over news industry revenues as an executive revealed the impact of recent Google updates at Mail Online.

Speaking at Press Gazette’s Future of Media Technology Conference last week, a group of industry experts warned there is a mismatch between how the news industry and tech platforms calculate value that means publishers are powerless addressing them alone.

Carly Steven, the global head of search engine optimisation (SEO) at Mail Online, said a June anti-spam update rolled out by Google had hit affiliate revenue from, for example, publisher voucher code and betting offers, which she said “effectively turned off a very significant revenue stream for a lot of publishers”.

“All of that content – that was really valuable, and we genuinely believe our readers find it very valuable too – it was just gone overnight.”

She said it spoke to a broader trend wherein publishers have less control in an increasingly unpredictable online landscape.

“We used to have a lot of control, as SEO editors or people working in this industry… We used to be able to tweak a headline, add some links and get something back. It used to be so easy… All that control is gone. I could not do that anymore.

“If an editor says to me: ‘I want this story to rank at the start of the top stories rail’ – I cannot make that happen in the way that we used to do.”

Googe deployment of AI Overviews varies wildly from week to week

Referring to AI Overviews, the artificial intelligence-generated summaries Google has begun deploying at the top of some search results, Steven said “the challenge that we’re facing… is that it does keep changing.

“We’ve taken part in studies where we’ve analysed our own keywords and seen that AI Overviews have been present for 23% of all the keywords that drive traffic to our website. And then the next week that’s 5%.

“So it’s very hard to be able to make decisions right now based on the data that we have.”

AI Overviews concern some publishers because they are displayed above links in Google’s search results, pushing publishers further down the page and potentially answering user enquiries without sharing any traffic.

But Steven said for now their impact on traffic was unclear, asking: “Do people ever click if you have a link within an AI overview? Probably not, but right now, we just don’t know…

“What’s taking up my time at the moment, in terms of trying to understand the AI landscape, is developing the tools to enable us to track it on an ongoing basis.”

SEO consultant Barry Adams said from what he’d seen AI Overviews “don’t really present a threat, yet, to publishers – at least not in the context of news, where AI Overviews are mostly absent from news topics”. He said they are presented more often for “evergreen” information.

Last month research by consultancy Authoritas that found AI Overviews were being offered for 17% of queries in the UK and US on the top keywords. Earlier, Press Gazette-commissioned research by Authoritas published in June saw AI Overviews offered for 24% of the top keywords driving publisher traffic.

Adams said overviews did not “seem to be cannibalising as much traffic as maybe some had expected – it tends to be low single-digit percentage traffic losses, which basically makes AI Overviews just another search feature like you had before… So it’ll be just another thing to optimise for. Which means more work for everybody, yay.”

Mismatch between how publishers and platforms assess value

Denis Haman, the chief executive of Glide Publishing Platform, described the relationship between publishers and platforms as “abusive” and questioned whether big tech could ever meaningfully value news.

“We’re not friends, we’re not even frenemies,” he said. “That’s the reality… it doesn’t matter whether you’re exposing corruption or whether you’re telling life stories, the media plays a role in society which has a greater value than what some random number cruncher at Meta will assign to it.”

Madhav Chinnappa, a senior executive consultant at AI data marketplace Human Native and previously the director of news ecosystem development at Google, said: “The reality is that the tech companies, from their California headquarters, look at the industries that they touch and they value them based on the revenue that they bring in.”

In the news industry’s case, he said “it’s de minimis, right?

“I actually was on a panel with an ex-Facebook person who talked about it, and he said: ‘Look, actually, the value of news to Facebook is zero if not negative, because when they took news off, their revenues went up.’

“So they’re valuing it based on dollars in. But I think the news industry and news people value the news industry on societal value…. I think that’s actually one of the fundamental factors about why this relationship has been so difficult.”

‘Green shoots’ resulted from collective industry attempts to cajole big tech

On a more optimistic note, Mail Online’s Steven said that “a really positive unintended consequence” of June’s Google spam SEO update for publishers was that “it’s forced us together a lot more”.

“While that was a terrible thing that happened… publishers all came together to put pressure on Google, to insist on having conversations with them.

“I’m not saying that we’ve got the solution that we wanted to, but it was really productive, and not just because it’s a bit of a therapy session.”

She said there had been “green shoots” from those discussions.

“I feel like, personally, our relationship with Google – while it can be frustrating because we don’t get answers – I feel like there’s been some small victories. 

“And maybe I need to be more ambitious with my targets, but on the back of some of the things that we collectively as publishers have raised, Google… clarified things, they tweak the rules.”

Steven said Google is “not really interested in you individually as a publisher”.

“But when you have a whole industry coming together and being able to provide evidence and proof that ‘you made this change, and something collectively happened to all of us, and the consequences of that are really bad for your users who are searching for this information on Google’ – then they pay a little bit more attention.”

SEO expert Adams said: “You need to hold them accountable, because if you just let them get away with it, they aren’t just going to care about us.”

He added: “It is not true that all of Google search results are purely algorithmic. There are some specific aspects, like for example, around Covid information, where Google will manually whitelist websites…

“We need to lift that veil off of it and understand these are just human-coded algorithms – coded by people who make editorial decisions on what works and what doesn’t work, and it is okay to hold them to account.”

Chinnappa agreed that publishers needed to work together to influence big tech, saying tech companies are “culturally different” from the news industry and that the way to sway them was “at scale, with data”.

‘Don’t get split up by bits of money here and there’

On the question of whether publishers should licence their content to artificial intelligence companies, Chinnappa noted that away from giants like Google and OpenAI, “there’s actually an entire AI developer ecosystem of small and not so small developers who also need access to content, and they want it for specific reasons, whether it’s niche content or it’s hard to find in a big data set, or, quite selfishly, they don’t want to get sued into oblivion…

“I think we need to be helping get that ecosystem that’s sustainable for both sides. Because I hope that data licensing becomes a sustainable revenue stream for publishers going forward, but we need to push in that direction together.”

And Haman, similarly, said “there’s an opportunity nowadays, with a new crop of big tech companies emerging, where we should come together as an industry and see whether we can influence the governments, band together, don’t get split up by bits of money here and there.

“Because it’s not just the big guys. News Corp will do a deal, Axel Springer will do a deal, of course they will – as they should, people should pay for the content.

“But what about smaller publishers? Who’s going to compensate them for the content that’s been taken from them without permission?…

“I don’t think that they’re going to have a breakthrough and all of a sudden see the value that that media industry [adds to] society, and it’s something that needs to be protected.”

The post Google killing publisher voucher codes overnight part of wider trend, says Mail exec appeared first on Press Gazette.

The Sun and the Mail have both made redundancies to their US editorial teams this week.

Over the past year to 18 months many news publishers have been hit by Google algorithm changes and Facebook’s move away from news, with falling advertising revenue often following. The current moment has been dubbed the end of the “traffic era”.

The publisher of The Sun, where the larger redundancies were made, said it needed to “reset the strategy and resize the team to secure the long term, sustainable future for The Sun’s business in the US”.

The Sun launched a dedicated US website at the-sun.com in late 2019, creating new content aimed directly at an American audience as well as building on the brand’s existing entertainment and royal coverage. An accompanying app launch followed in May this year.

It steadily grew traffic and peaked in April 2023 at 95.4 million monthly visits in the US, according to digital market intelligence company Similarweb.

In August the site was on just over a third of that, with 34.1 million US visits according to Similarweb.

On Press Gazette's latest round-up of the 50 biggest news websites in the US, The Sun was in 34th place with the biggest year-on-year decline of 46%. In December 2022 it was the 18th biggest site amid a long streak of seeing the biggest growth.

However Will Payne, The Sun’s director of digital who led the site’s launch, once told Press Gazette the US Sun over-indexed on mobile and this is less well-reflected on Similarweb.

In its latest quarterly results, The Sun's owner News Corp said the brand (thesun.co.uk, the-sun.com and other associated websites and mobile apps) reached 112 million monthly unique users in June, down 30% from 159 million in the same month the year before, according to Meta Pixel.

News Corp also cited "lower digital advertising mainly driven by a decline in traffic at some mastheads due to platform-related changes", although this was not referring to The Sun alone. Programmatic advertising has been the primary source of revenue for the US Sun and the site "became profitable much, much quicker than we anticipated", Payne said two years ago.

Earlier in the year News Corp said that in March The Sun reached 126 million global monthly unique users, down 37% year-on-year from 199 million.

According to Similarweb, between March and August 68% of visits to The Sun US came via organic search, with 13% direct, 11% from social and 8% through other referrals.

Staff were told this week of the redundancies. One of the affected journalists, deputy head of SEO Gabriella Iannetta, wrote on Linkedin: "I was part of mass layoffs at the US Sun this week nearly nine months after being laid off last year.

"It’s been a tough 12 months for publishers everywhere and newsrooms are hurting as Google and Meta move to keep users on its own properties and away from news outlets.

"News Corp has been a special place for me. I was one of the first SEO editors at The Sun when it first opened in 2020. It became the fastest growing digital news site of its time. I boomeranged back in 2024 as an associate head to support the editorial team’s SEO and article quality needs."

Other editorial staff to have posted online about being laid off include general news reporters, entertainment reporters and sports reporters.

A spokesperson told Press Gazette: "The US Sun has been an incredibly successful business, driving billions of page views, however the digital landscape has experienced seismic change in the last 12 months and we need to reset the strategy and resize the team to secure the long term, sustainable future for The Sun’s business in the US."

They declined to confirm how many redundancies were made or the new size of the team.

As it began to grow in early 2020 The US Sun had a team of about 20 people based in New York. Press Gazette later reported that it had almost 100 journalists by October 2022. Some of its journalists are based in London to help provide coverage to start the day in the US.

Mail Online job cuts 'difficult but necessary'

Meanwhile layoffs have also been made at Mail Online in the US, affecting up to 10% of the more than 200 staff based there, Press Gazette understands.

Mail Online founded its first US newsroom in Los Angeles in 2010 and opened its American headquarters in New York in 2012.

It is now the ninth biggest news website in the US (and the biggest British news publisher across the Atlantic) according to Press Gazette's latest monthly ranking, with 136.1 million visits in July up 2% year-on-year.

A spokesperson for Mail publisher Associated Newspapers said: "We have made a small number of job cuts in some areas of our US editorial department.

"This was a difficult, but necessary decision, which will enable us to continue to invest in areas where we can grow our audience."

The post Sun and Mail make journalist redundancies in US appeared first on Press Gazette.

Mail Online has removed a story describing a village as Britain’s “grimmest” after its MP, Gavin Williamson, complained to press regulator IPSO.

The story, published in April, reported that Featherstone in South Staffordshire was “covered in rubbish and dog faeces”, hemmed in by prisons and overrun by crime.

Williamson complained to the regulator that the story included several inaccurate claims about Featherstone, for example that a recently constructed bus shelter depicted in the article had been “torched by yobs”.

Williamson said the bus stop was in Shareshill, rather than Featherstone, and that the damage was caused not by vandalism but by a lorry transporting bales of hay that caught on fire and fell on it.

The former defence secretary disputed the claim that Featherstone is “surrounded by three jails”, arguing that the prisons referred to were in neighbouring Brinsford and that one of them was a young offenders institute.

The story also reported that between January and the start of April this year there had been 39 violent and sexual offences, 13 vehicle crimes, six thefts and five cases of criminal damage and arson in the village – as well as that “[a]ll 165 burglaries reported in Outer Rothwell in West Yorkshire in the past three years remain unsolved”.

Williamson incorrectly took the latter quote to suggest that Mail Online had accidentally published crime figures for Featherstone in Yorkshire rather than Featherstone in Staffordshire, but the reference to Outer Rothwell had been made as the article linked to an earlier report about “England’s worst neighbourhood for unsolved burglaries”. Mail Online informed IPSO that the crime statistics did indeed relate to Featherstone in Staffordshire.

Mail Online initially stood by its report that the bus shelter had been “torched by yobs” because local posts on social media had claimed as much, but was subsequently informed by the news agency that provided the story, SWNS, that Williamson’s account was correct, so published a footnote correction.

The publication also offered to amend the claim that Featherstone is “surrounded” by prisons “as a gesture of goodwill and in the interests of resolving the complaint”.

This did not resolve the complaint however, and IPSO began an investigation, during which Mail Online offered to remove the article from the website altogether.

Williamson agreed that this would satisfy him and so IPSO did not determine whether a breach of the code had occurred.

Williamson is the latest in a string of MPs to complain to IPSO about press coverage over the past year, although such complaints have typically related to stories reporting on the politicians themselves.

In May Conservative MP Scott Benton unsuccessfully complained that The Times had unjustifiably used subterfuge when filming him appearing to lobby for the gambling industry without his knowledge.

The SNP’s Kirsty Blackman complained in November about a column in The National – written by another SNP MP, Joanna Cherry – that had mentioned her. Her complaint was also unsuccessful.

And former Conservative health secretary Matt Hancock has had mixed success complaining to IPSO, winning one complaint against the Mirror but losing his complaint over The Telegraph’s “Whatsapp files” story and another about a claim in the Mirror that he was a “failed health secretary and cheating husband”.

The post Mail Online removes ‘Britain’s grimmest’ village story after Gavin Williamson complaint appeared first on Press Gazette.