James King writes of his year working in the Daily Mail Online‘s newsroom. It sounds as vile as you could imagine.
Yes, most outlets regularly aggregate other publications’ work in the quest for readership and material, and yes, papers throughout history have strived for the grabbiest headlines facts will allow. But what DailyMail.com does goes beyond anything practiced by anything else calling itself a newspaper. In a little more than a year of working in the Mail’s New York newsroom, I saw basic journalism standards and ethics casually and routinely ignored. I saw other publications’ work lifted wholesale. I watched editors at the most highly trafficked English-language online newspaper in the world publish information they knew to be inaccurate.
“We do things a little differently than you might be used to,” U.S. editor Katherine Thomson told me, early in my time there.
She was right.
Gawker: My Year Ripping Off the Web With the Daily Mail Online