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- Wednesday 14th June: Telegraph acquisition could give DMGT half UK daily newspaper market
Wednesday 14th June: Telegraph acquisition could give DMGT half UK daily newspaper market
Good morning! Today's newsletter is brought to you by Peter.
There’s speculation that Daily Mail publisher DMGT will be a likely bidder for the Telegraph Media Group after it was put up for sale by receivers when the Barclay family failed to service its debts. According to Press Gazette, DMGT bid for the paper the last time it went up for auction in 2004.
Analysis run by Press Gazette suggests that if DMGT was successful, the combined group would control more than half of the UK’s national daily newspaper market. Its numbers show the Daily Mail, Metro and i newspapers together already have 49% of the estimated market. The Telegraph’s 5% would take the Daily Mail publisher past the half-way mark.
While you might think that having half the UK’s daily newspaper output under the control of a very wealthy individual who lives elsewhere is a really bad idea, consider a rumour that I heard recently. Apparently billionaire GB-News backer Sir Paul Marshall - allegedly also interested in the Spectator- has always wanted to own a daily paper. 😱😱😱
Next week’s Big Noises guest is Jacob Donnelly and his latest take on why The Washington Post is losing to The New York Times is the perfect example of why. Jacob contrasts the NYT’s seemingly unstoppable digital subscription growth with WaPo’s loss of half a million digital subscribers since 2021. He blames the Post’s long-term strategy and says owner Jeff Bezos has two options - sell or leverage its ARC XP CMS with local partners to build out a national/international/local news network.
Well this is depressing. The Light, a UK conspiracy theory ‘newspaper’ is distributing 100,000 copies a month throughout 30 towns and cities in the UK. According to the BBC’s disinformation and social media correspondent Marianna Spring, the propaganda sheet paper carries a mix of ‘false and misleading’ claims about vaccines, the financial system and climate change, amid other more mundane articles on local politics, health and wellness.
Who says there isn’t any money in magazines? Texere Publishing, a scientific publisher based not far from me in England’s Northwest, has been acquired by US-based healthcare media company BroadcastMed. The value of the deal hasn’t been disclosed, but one of the company’s initial investors is reported to have achieved a 4.5x return on its 2012 investment. Not too shabby.
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