Global publisher of the Daily Mail Martin Clarke has said that his Australian operation is “one of the things I worry about least” at a press event aboard the Daily Mail’s luxury yacht at Cannes yesterday.
Introducing his Australian managing director Peter Holder, Clarke said that the Australian edition of the Daily Mail’s rapid ascension from 13th to 4th most read news site made his job very easy.
At the same event, Australian journalist come breakfast TV personality, Lisa Wilkinson, said that many media providers had “failed to recognise the power that was coming in the form of the internet”.
“I have made no secret that publishers, in particular magazine publishers (to a lesser extent newspaper publishers), made really strategic errors 15 or so years ago when the internet first came along,” she said.
“They were threatened and they were a bit like that kid in fourth class that you used to try and copy their maths.”
She added that magazine publishers thought they had a monopoly on content and didn’t want to share it and they suffered as a consequence.
“They wanted everybody else to create what they already had and didn’t realise that people would have their own content, and they felt basically threatened and as a consequence of that they failed to recognise what people were after,” she said.
She also said she saw so many people “that I thought were really smart”, be completely confused about it all, which “was kind of really sad”, she added.
Wilkinson said “it’s all about content” and that Australia was still trying to recover from the concentrated media ownership which saw media in Australia controlled by three families: the Fairfaxs, the Packers and the Murdochs.
Image via Nine.
