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overview
holdings
landmarks
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overview
This profile considers the Daily Mail & General Trust
(DMGT) group, the descendant of the newspaper empire built
by Lord Northcliffe and Lord Rothermere.
It covers -
introduction
Daily Mail & General Trust - corporate site here
- is a dominant newspaper publisher in the UK and has substantial
radio holdings in Australia.
The group traces its origins to the newspaper and magazine
built at the turn of last century by Lord Northcliffe, an
innovator whose grasp of the popular press was exceeed only
by an increasing megalomania. High profile but marginally
profitable acquisitions such as the Observer,
Times and Sunday Times were offloaded
but Northcliffe's heirs retained large print and pulp holdings.
His brother, the first Lord Rothermere, and nephew dabbled
in UK and Hungarian politics - notably through bizarre suggestions
of availability for the Hungarian throne and support for
ultra-conservative groups in the interwar UK - but without
conspicuous success.
More recently DMGT has accumulated substantial UK radio
interests (embodied in GWR, which merged with Capital in
mid-2005 as GCap), expanded into
trade shows and professional publications, and held 60 radio
licenses in Australia. In September 2004 it sold 57 Australian
regional radio stations to Regional Media (later Macquarie
Media) for $193.5 million.
A chronology of the group is here.
the group
The group currently encompasses
- UK
metropolitan and regional newspapers
- specialist
publications such as Euromoney and Petroleum
Economist
- television
broadcasting and production
- radio
broadcasting in the UK and Australia
- trade
shows and related publications in the Americas, Middle
East, UK and Australasia
An
indication of current holdings is here.
Northcliffe
Alfred Harmsworth Lord Northcliffe (1865-1922) - bad,
mad and dangerous to know - founded the print dynasty
in 1888 as a free-lance contributor to popular periodicals.
His brother Harold (1868-1940) - later 1st Viscount Rothermere
- acted as financial administrator of what became the
world's largest periodical combine, the Amalgamated Press.
Northcliffe bought the London Evening News in 1894,
going on to found the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror
before seizing the Times in 1908 (it was sold to
John Jacob Astor after his death
before being acquired by Roy Thomson
and Rupert Murdoch).
Northcliffe's interest in politics was fitful but intense.
He campaigned vigorously against the Asquith government
and, like Beaverbrook, for
imperial preference (ie free trade within the British
empire).
Paul Ferris's The House Of Northcliffe - Biography
Of An Empire (New York: World 1972) is the most readable
study of the family. Sally Taylor's The Great Outsiders:
Northcliffe, Rothermere & the Daily Mail (London:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1996) updates the story but
is arguably overly sympathetic to proprietor foibles.
Northcliffe (London: Cassell 1959) by Reginald
Pound & Geoffrey Harmsworth is detailed, reverent
and dull. Harry Greenwall's Northcliffe: Napoleon of
Fleet Street (London: Cassell 1957) is undistinguished.
J Lee Thompson's dessicated Northcliffe (London:
John Murray 2000) reheats his more academic Politicians,
the Press & Propaganda: Lord Northcliffe & the
Great War, 1914-1919 (Bowling Green: Kent State Uni
Press 2000). Those in search of insights about the man
and milieu might more profitably turn to Stephen Koss's
superb two volume The Rise & Fall of the Political
Press in Britain (London: Hamish Hamilton 1984) or
Papers for the Millions: the New Journalism in Britain,
1850s to 1914 (New York: Greenwood 1988)
edited by Joel Wiener.
Richard Bourne's Lords of Fleet Street: The Harmsworth
Dynasty (London: Unwin Hyman 1991) is less substantial.
For
a view of his impact consult Northcliffe's Legacy:
Aspects of the British Popular Press 1896-1996 (New
York: St Martins 2000), edited by Peter Catterall &
Colin Seymour-Ure.
The exchange between Northcliffe and George Bernard Shaw
Northcliffe
- The trouble with you, Shaw, is that you look as if
there were famine in the land.
Shaw - The trouble with you, Northcliffe, is that you
look as if you were the cause of it.
appears
to be apocryphal. He inspired over a dozen contemporary
novels, including Joseph Conrad & Ford Madox Ford's
1900 The Inheritors, Marie Leighton's 1900 A
Napoleon of the Press, Keble Howard's 1913 Lord
London and Walter L George's 1920 Caliban.
Rothermere
Rothermere acquired Northcliffe's stake in the Daily
Mail in 1914, becoming Air Minister in 1917. Rothermere
restructured the family interests after the death of Northcliffe.
In 1923 Sir Edward Hulton refused
to dispose of his newspaper chain to Rothermere: Beaverbrook
instead bought the chain as a "friend", passing most of
the titles to the Harmsworths and receiving the Standard
as commission. A 1922 exhange of interests between Beaverbrook
and Rothermere (the latter for example at one time held
49% of Express Newspapers) was dissolved in 1933.
By 1928, with daily sales of the Daily Mail reaching
two million, Rothermere was reported to be worth around
£25 million (supposedly the third richest man in
the UK) and reinforced his position through acquisition
of papers Wales, Midlands and North-East of England as
Northcliffe Newspapers. A mixture of commercial opportunism,
vanity and anxiety about socialism saw him join with Beaverbrook
to establish the United Empire Party and urge the Tories
to remove Stanley Baldwin as Conservative Party leader.
Rationalisation in the early thirties was reflected in
establishment in 1930 of the News Chronicle (absorbed
by Daily Mail in 1960), sale of the downmarket
Daily Mirror in 1931 and further regional expansion
(notably through a 40% stake in Bristol United Press in
1935). Relations with Beaverbrook unsurprisingly soured
and an ongoing
drift to the right saw Rothermere support Oswald Mosley's
National Union of Fascists, evident in a 1934 article
'Hurrah for the Blackshirts' praising Mosley for "sound,
commonsense, Conservative doctrine".
Rothermere was a leading exponent of appeasement but stepped
back from the very brink in 1939. In 2005 the UK Public
Record Office revealed that Rothermere had written to
Hitler congratulating Germany on annexation of Czechoslovakia
and urging the Führer to march into Romania. His
7 July 1939 telegram to von Ribbentrop said that
Our
two great Nordic countries should pursue resolutely
a policy of appeasement for, whatever anyone may say,
our two great countries should be the leaders of the
world
following
up a recent letter to Hitler that began
My
Dear Führer, I have watched with understanding
and interest the progress of your great and superhuman
work in regenerating your country
and
doesn't appear to have got much better.
Harold Harmsworth's My Campaign for Hungary (London:
Eyre & Spottiswoode 1939), Warnings & Predictions
and My Fight to Rearm Britain offer a perspective
on the family's dalliance with the British Union of Fascists,
Mussolini and Hitler pre-1938.
Another perspective is offered by Martha Schad's Hitler's
Spy Princess: The Extraordinary Life of Princess Stephanie
von Hohenlohe (Sutton 2004) on go-between Princess
Stephanie von Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfurst (1891-1972).
Rothermere's realignment in 1939 saw an embarrassing lawsuit
in which the princess alleged that the publisher had promised
to pay her US$20,000 a year for life. Rothermere admitted
paying her US$250,000 in six years to facilitate relations
with Germany, explaining "I expected her to live
like a queen."
recent expansion and uncertainty
In 2005 DMGT announced plans to auction off its Northcliffe
regional newspapers (some 100 titles), with an expectation
that it would score around £1.5 billion (potentially
useful in a bid for broadcaster GCap).
In February 2006 DMGT backed off after private-equity
groups CVC and Candover joined forces and Gannett was
distracted by simultaneous sale of Knight Ridder newspaper
assets in the US. Private-equity group Providence, the
third bidder in the later stages of the auction, also
failed to come up with what DMGT considered an acceptable
offer.
There is a thin profile of the third Lord Rothermere in
Nicholas Coleridge's Paper Tigers (London: Heinemann
1993). Sally Taylor's The Reluctant Press Lord: Esmond
Rothermere & 'The Daily Mail' (London: Phoenix
1999) and An Unlikely Hero - Vere Rothermere and how
the Daily Mail was Saved (London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson 2003) have more depth. Piers Brendon's The
Life & Death of the Press Barons (London: Secker &
Warburg 1982) offers context.
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