Daily Mail (LSE: DMGT) editor Paul Dacre seems under no illusions about the task facing his newspaper business as it transitions to digital. Opening yesterday’s Society Of Editors conference in Bristol, Dacre acknowledged (via Guardian.co.uk) the local newspaper market, “its editorial costs already cut to the bone and its once lucrative classifieds migrating en masse to the internet, seems locked in a seemingly inexorable downward spiral“. That presumably includes Mail owner DMGT’s Northcliffe regional wing as well.
Dacre went on to boast some Mail Online stats… “On any given weekday, Mail Online now attracts 450,000 British users, each of whom will spend on average nine minutes per visit and over 20 percent of whom will pay more than one visit that day. We journalists have proved that our sites can be an editorial success. Now the commercial and managerial sides of our industry must find ways of making a profit from those numbers.”
As an illustration of Dacre’s doom-and-gloom view: Trinity Mirror is shedding 30 jobs and the Daily Mirror 11.