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Comment by jimmytidey | Hacker News Reader

The Yahoo brand has really positive associations for me, their company ethos always seems to have been about good design, sharing with the developer community, providing really useful services.

The Daily Mail is a horrible company that will stoop to any level to earn a buck [1][2].

It seems like a terrible cultural fit and it would be a sad end to Yahoo.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11133950 [2] http://www.themediablog.co.uk/the-media-blog/2013/01/daily-m...

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Most of Yahoo! will be haemorrhaging money. If it drags the Daily Mail down with it, not everyone will be upset about that.

See also Rupert Murdoch and Myspace. And possibly also TimeWarner and AOL.

These giant mergers never seem to work, and I can't even begin to imagine how Yahoo's culture would be any kind of fit at all for the DM's.

Daily Mail may have questionable journalism, but when a large public-interest story breaks, it is often the first to have large pictures of the story. As they say, a picture can be worth a thousand words.

They also seem to be the first to cover category-B news, i.e. a light plane crash in some distant country. As long as there are photos, the Daily Mail will have it on their front page today, the Telegraph tomorrow, and the BBC perhaps on the third day.

I don't think that's true any more; all the news outlets will happily raid social media and wire services for photos and have the pictures within hours. After all, in 24h it'll be old news.

The Daily Mail can do serious journalism when it wants to. But unfortunately that's a small fraction of the paper, and the website is a far worse collection of celebrity fashion marketing clickbait. (Note the combination of "isn't this outfit SHOCKING" stories with a big embedded ad telling you where to buy it).

They also do tremendously bad racist pandering at every opportunity. The only thing to be said for the Mail is that at least it's not the Express.

Yes, so racist they were the only paper to accuse the murderers of Stephen Lawrence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Stephen_Lawrence#Sub...

This is the newspaper equivalent of "I have black friends".

I have no idea if the Daily Mail regularly publishes racist articles, I never read it, but the fact that they once reported on a race-related story is not really relevant. You wouldn't accept a single headline as evidence that the Daily Mail is racist, right?

There must be a Godwin's type law for this type of argument?

It's a brilliant example being it's the _only_ example you can find of them being half way decent.

They were not the only one covering the story TBH. What they were was the only newspaper to directly name them post-inquiry.

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/1997/feb/15/lawrence.ukcrime

This actions honestly fits the Daily Mail's typical populist, outrage-driven, go-with-the-gut-feeling style. The vast majority of the time this does not work out for them. "Even a broken clock is right twice a day" etc.

Really, though, if I were a Yahoo user, I would be more concerned personally about the Daily Mail's Buzzfeedisms: the celebrity clickbait, their recent embrace of "native advertising". This sounds like the perfect sort of things that Yahoo would try to insert into some of their products for extra monetization. And a great way to make the Yahoo user experience even worse than it is already.

> They also seem to be the first to cover category-B news

not for good reason, it has to be something like a crash of somekind (car, plane, boat, people), something that has explosions, or breasts, and always with pictures to cater for their demographic (I'm not even joking)

I am eternally flabbergasted by the fact they still have not taken this down, or corrected it: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1296282/I-dos...

That article could have come straight out of an episode of Brass Eye:

> This is the world of ‘i-Dosing’, the new craze sweeping the internet in which teenagers used so-called ‘digital drugs’ to change their brains in the same way as real-life narcotics.

I also like that they allow comments and discussion on controversial stuff like islamic terrorism. If you read the stories on the Guardian or NYT all discussion tends to be banned in those areas in case someone says something politically incorrect. I'm not sure trying to prevent people discussing the issues makes them go away. I think stuff like that has led to it being "the most visited English-language newspaper website in the world." As well as Kardashian stories or course.

My favourite line from the Guardian came when they realised that the vast majority of their left-leaning readers strongly disagreed with them regarding Islamic terrorism and the refugee crisis.

Closed comments on certain articles due to “a change in mainstream public opinion and language that we do not wish to see reflected or supported on the site”.[0]

At least they didn't even pretend that it wasn't because the majority of their readership disagreed with them.

[0]http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/31/readers...

They need a downvote button or similar. That's a big part of how the Mail deals with it. Even with the Mail most readers aren't that racist so the upvoted comments are not so bad.

I didn't even know about this. Thank you. Saving it in case some mod removes your comment. It goes to show the insane biases people have. I know Daily Mail is trash. I also know Guardian is as well.

I'm not a mod but I know they don't remove comments like that.

You sure try though.

The comments serve as some justification for the newspaper's extreme positions.

The paper can claim not to be extreme by pointing to comments that directly call for murder of refugees or genocide of gypsy travellers.

I think even in the Mail that stuff gets modded or heavily downvoted.

When a large public-interest story breaks, they're also not above outright lying and making it up.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2011/dec/09/pcc-...

They had the wrong Knox court verdict up for 90 seconds before correcting it. Seems more like a cock up than outright lying in that case.

There's no problem with newspapers writing a stock pieces for either eventuality, and yes, sometimes someone will accidentally press the wrong button, and the wrong version might go up for a bit.

But the wrong story they put up wasn't a generic piece. It has specific claims about specific actions, which obviously didn't happen. They made claims about how the defendent acted upon hearing the judgement (Knox "sank into her chair sobbing uncontrollably while her family and friends hugged each other in tears"), it had quotes from Italian prison officers, etc. It was clearly an outright fabrication. They wrote, in detail, about Knox' reaction to the verdict, before the vedict was handed down. And we only know they made it up because they cocked up.

anything for that money...

>but when a large public-interest story breaks, it is often the first to have large pictures of the story. As they say, a picture can be worth a thousand words.

They do say that, but they are wrong. A picture can be as manipulative as any cheap slogan.

It also gives a false sense of understanding an issue, without getting into the details of it (to give a crude example:

Picture of poor starving child in country Y.

― oh, how bad are those X people.

(despite the fact that country Y attacked X and impoverished 10 times as many people).

Sometimes the Daily Mail even credits the online source that they ripped off. Not always, though.

The Daily Mail has a bad reputation with the Twitterring classes, but like every other UK newspaper they cater for their own audiences - it just so happens that you probably aren't in that particular group.

If Yahoo are in trouble then they need leadership to find an audience (and adjust their services appropriately). What better way than to rely on the owner of one of the most successful news outlets? Either that, or it slowly disappears.

Daily Mail has always had a bad reputation, unless you're in the racist warmongering homophobic group, since their inception over a century ago. I'd not limit it to just with the twittering classes though.

They were repeatedly accused of warmongering in the years preceding WW1.

They actively promoted fascism and the blackshirts in the 30s, and promoted Mosley. They changed their stance in 39 only to avoid charges of treason.

Even amidst their renaissance in the 80s they managed to stay controversial in opposing any sporting bans with S Africa and ran opinion pieces promoting apartheid.

It's only 2012 there was some controversy for running a piece promoting "arbeit macht frei" as jobhunting advice. They did describe the phrase as "somewhat tainted"

They have at least been consistent in their reactionary racist bilge.

Say whatever you want, but they still make money and they have a huge readership.

How is this at all relevant? Nobody is accusing it of being unpopular.

> The Daily Mail has a bad reputation with the Twitterring classes, but like every other UK newspaper they cater for their own audiences

The Daily Mail has a bad reputation with virtually anyone in the UK who has any interest in accuracy of reporting. It is a rag which makes money by selling fear and outrage.

Which UK papers, except perhaps The Spectator or Private Eye, do not make their money through fear and outrage on either the left or right?

I'd say the Grauniad (read - Guardian) isn't _as_ bad as the other broadsheets.

Well, they've definitely been starting on the clickbait and outrage baiting in the last few years. They especially like riding the 'internet harassment' bandwagon into the ground.

Better than the Daily Mail? Yes, not much isn't, even in the UK media. But they're still getting worse over time.

All papers will carry stories that have elements of fear and outrage in their mix of course. What makes the Mail special is that it puts fear and outrage at the very core of its proposition. It is what it specialises in. It will jettison any other aspect of a story, including accuracy, to maximise these factors. It is wholly toxic.

>The Daily Mail has a bad reputation with the Twitterring classes, but like every other UK newspaper they cater for their own audiences - it just so happens that you probably aren't in that particular group.

It also happens to that particular group has base taste, and the Daily Mail caters to their worst gossipy, vacuous, racist, sexist, backwards, etc, nature. It's a manipulative, right wing, yellow paper/site.

We can't bypass ethics, education, etc. because "people have different tastes" -- and yes, the parent comment doesn't say that, but it seems to imply it.

Are they really that successful? Total Mail Online revenue appears to be under £100m (although growing rapidly):

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jan/28/daily-mail-webs...

They're the second-biggest newspaper in the UK.

Now look at the figures for any other UK newspaper.

> but like every other UK newspaper they cater for their own audience

And their audience is pretty enormous. Mail Online has well over 250 million unique visitors per month, or half-a-Wikipedia and on-par with the sum of all of Yahoo's properties. It's the most-visited English-language news site in the World.

Their London-orientated Metro Online adds another 40 million per month.

Those stats are incredible. I suspect they are accurate given the sort of puff and nonsense they peddle on there. I still don't think being very successfull running a gossip site covers all of what running Yahoo! requires.

Surely this is just to raise their stock price? This can't be real, can it?

I hope not, because the Daily Mail are fairly disgusting.

Oracle buying Sun all over again?

And Sun buying Cobalt?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_Qube

I always wonder why the type of accusation against DailyMail are never to be seen when it's about e.g The Guardian? Do people actually believe there is a distinction in quality between all these tabloids? As if Guardian would be of higher quality than Daily Mail? That can't be it? For every trash article you point out on the DM one could find the same from Guardian.

Snapshot: The current top headline at the Guardian's UK website concerns David Cameron facing MPs over his father's offshore bank account (exposed in the Panama Papers leak).

The current top news headline at the Daily Mail is something about Kate Middleton's $4200 dress.

This is pretty typical. I don't consider the Guardian the best journalism has to offer. But the Daily Mail is way more "tabloid-lite", with a huge amount of gossip and celebrity culture. The fluffy stories make the Daily Mail far closer to something like a full-on tabloid (like The Sun etc.) to me. It's not just editorial stance we are talking about.

Yahoo was until just recently pursuing a ridiculously blatant tax evasion strategy to sell off their one worthwhile asset (their stake in alibaba). I'd suggest they are exactly as evil as the Daily Mail Group, just they have better PR.

Tax avoidance - they were sticking to the legal stuff.

It was borderline and now banned.

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