Whatever one might think of Mail Online, it has been the most significant innovation at the media group since Sir David English’s radical redesign of the “compact” Daily Mail half a century ago. Martin Clarke was among the first in the industry to see how the internet would change the way information is spread around the world.
He set up Mail Online as several senior people at the group – including the then Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre – were sceptical it was ever going to be more than a passing fad. Indeed, Dacre assured his staff just before the turn of the millennium: “A lot of people say that the internet is the future for newspapers. Well, I say to that: bullshit.com.”
In Lord Rothermere’s recent bewildering series of staff reshuffles – Dacre leaving and then returning, Geordie Greig being appointed and then unappointed as the Daily Mail’s editor – Clarke, the creator of the most-visited English-language newspaper website in the world and almost certainly Rothermere’s most valuable card, has fallen from the pack. This, I am told, is a matter of profound regret for his lordship.
Clarke himself is now making the most of his contractual period of enforced leisure.
“He’s in Miami, learning how to fly,” Mandrake is informed. “At the same pilot-training school, funnily enough, where the terrorists Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi trained before taking part in the 9/11 attacks.”
Lord Rothermere’s reshuffle regrets
Losing the Mail Online's Martin Clarke is a matter of profound regret for his lordship
