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Mail Online starts posting Australian showbiz content, right rail to be live ‘in fortnight’

Martin Clarke

Martin Clarke

The Mail Online has started feeding Australian-generated stories onto the showbiz news section of the site and expects a geo-targeted ‘sidebar of shame’ to be live in a fortnight, after hiring three key editorial staff for the section this week.

Martin Clarke, global publisher and editor-in-chief, is in Sydney interviewing applicants for editorial jobs at the website, in the latest survey of online news sites by Nielsen, which knocked rival UK publisher The Guardian’s Australian offering from the top ten, and expects three more appointments to be confirmed by Friday.

The British publisher, which has the biggest English language website in the world, announced plans to launch in Australia in November in a joint venture with Nine Entertainment Co’s digital arm Mi9, pledging to hire 50 journalists and with the aim of becoming the number one digital news platform in the country.

Having received over 200 applications from journalists from across the sector, including those working for News Corp Australia and Fairfax, Clarke told Mumbrella he will continue the interview process by video calls after he leaves the country next week. And journalists, news editors, page editors and picture editors are still welcome to submit their CVs.

Former news.com.au editor Luke McIlveen is expected to lead the editorial side of the site after settling a court action with News Corp over the Christmas period, and is expected to be formally unveiled next month.

Clarke said there will be no official launch date for the full website in Australia as the plan is to build gradually, as it did in the US with a few landmark events, the first being the launch of a geo-targeted right rail, known to many as the ‘sidebar of shame’.

The next will be the launch of the full dailymail.com.au brand, anticipated to go live only when they are producing an entirely separate Australian homepage. Clarke said this will be “some months” as they first need to recruit and train a full staff.

“There is going to be no day when we go live, that’s not how you do it in digital. We never launched our American page, and yet we’re the second biggest newspaper website in America now. We had more visitors in America on Saturday and Sunday than the New York Times did,” Clarke said.

“This isn’t newspapers, there already is a Mail Online in Australia, we’re just going to make it more Australian. But that’s going to be a gradual process. You don’t have to launch the whole thing in one big splurge.”

Dailymail.co.uk already has around a quarter of a million unique visitors from Australia daily, Clarke said, and 1.3m a month according to Nielsen. Clarke insisted those readers won’t be deprived of the international content they go there for when the site changes, but added their interests differ from those of British readers, and their interests will be reflected in the right rail.

“Our whole model is based on giving people what they want and we’re not going to clog up the right rail with Australian showbiz stories at the expense of fantastic glamourous British or American showbiz, but there’s an awful lot of amazing Australian showbiz there and we edit that right rail on merit,” he said.

The Mail Online’s show business editor Natalie Trombetta, an Australian based at the site’s LA office, is in Sydney setting up the Australian team with the help of staff from her team, Clarke said. More journalists will come from London to Sydney in the next week to continue the site’s development.

“The whole thing evolves every day as it is so there isn’t going to be a big bang launch, it will just get gradually bigger and bigger and bigger, and hopefully by the winter it will be fully staffed and firing on all cylinders,” he said.

“That’s my kind of timeframe and then maybe we’ll have a big party once we’ve done it. At the Daily Mail we do stuff first and then we talk about it, not the other way around.”

Megan Reynolds

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