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Editor’s Note: Encyclo has not been regularly updated since August 2014, so information posted here is likely to be out of date and may be no longer accurate. It’s best used as a snapshot of the media landscape at that point in time.

The Daily Mail is a British tabloid newspaper with the largest online audience in the world.

Mail Online grew rapidly into one of the most-visited news websites by 2007, when its editors began chasing traffic by posting aggregated news stories, and prioritizing large photo spreads with long headlines to bolster visits. It had reached 154 million unique visitors by late 2013.

Founded in 1896 as a women’s newspaper, the Daily Mail also publishes editions in Scotland and Ireland, and launched The Mail on Sunday in 1982. It opened a New York office to house its online staff in 2011, and much of the Mail Online’s success online has been a result of its growing American audience, which now accounts for a third of all traffic.

In January 2012, the Daily Mail launched an India-specific edition of its website, Mail Online India. That month, MailOnline surpassed The New York Times to become the most popular newspaper website in the world, with over 50 million monthly unique visitors.

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Recent Nieman Lab coverage:

March 27, 2025 / Sophie Culpepper

How can we reach beyond the local news choir? Spotlight PA’s founding editor has ideas — As LinkedIn post ledes go, Spotlight PA CEO and editor Christopher Baxter’s on a post last week was intriguing: “I recently had lunch with a staunch, pro-Trump Republican and highly successful business leader, and hi...

March 27, 2025 / Joshua Benton

Robert W. McChesney, America’s leading left-wing critic of corporate media, has died — Robert W. McChesney, the lion of anti-corporate media scholarship, is dead at the age of 72. He was, for decades, probably the most prominent academic critic of American media from the left, focused on all the ways our i...

March 26, 2025 / Sarah Scire

“Some hard and important lessons”: One of the most promising local news nonprofits looks back — and ahead — It’s hard not to root for the National Trust for Local News. Heralded as a savior of local newspapers, the nonprofit has presented itself as the ideal foil to the hedge fund-owned chains that slash local newsroom jobs ...

March 25, 2025 / Joshua Benton

Jeffrey Goldberg got the push notification of all push notifications — and a hell of a story — Journalism’s biggest scoops usually require months — years! — of shoe-leather reporting. Developing sources. Building trust. Coaxing out documents. Analyzing data. Assembling tiny fragments of information — p...

March 20, 2025 / Joshua Benton

There’s another reason the L.A. Times’ AI-generated opinion ratings are bad (this one doesn’t involve the Klan) — In 1964, Philip Converse published what would become one of the most cited papers in all of political science, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics.”1 It was a result of a movement at the University ...

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Primary author: Linda Kinstler. Main text last updated: June 12, 2014.

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