Wolff: 'Daily Mail' solves Internet paradox

News is a reliable British export. The lineup of products has included the tabloid and broadsheet newspaper, which came to define modern journalism; the BBC, the first global news brand; and the Guardian's website, giving the world, for better or worse, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. And now, Mail Online.

Mail Online, with 180 million unique visitors a month, is not only the world's most-trafficked English-language newspaper website — establishing a powerful mass market connection or, depending on your point of view, a new low in the taste deficit — but quite possibly the first time a traditional print organization has solved the paradox of digital migration.

In this conundrum, the digital versions of newspapers or magazines invariably undermine the legacy product. The digital versions are, of course, ultimately supposed to replace the old-hat form. But, so far, these digital replacements, with substantially larger audiences and vastly smaller revenues than their print parents, are still dependent on print for their support — and yet, in the competition for eyeballs and advertisers, inevitably bite the hand that feeds them.

The New York Times' digital versions, which produce only a fraction of the company's revenue, rely on a vast staff still overwhelmingly supported by the literal paper. At the same time, the Times' website and apps draw readers from the paper itself and, as well, offer advertisers a much cheaper alternative.

Because of the publishing world's convert-like convictions that "digital is the future" and print must think of "digital first," the industry's business plan has become something of a hope and a prayer: Somehow, maybe, digital will find a way to support itself before print collapses — a collapse helped along by the growth of digital.

Mail Online, on the other hand, has, quite uniquely, managed to become an adjacent business to the print Daily Mail, with its revenue stream more cream on top than existential replacement.

In part, this is the result of a profound — albeit for the Mail, happenstance —understanding that the nature of media is dictated by their form and, as in the transition from theater to film or radio to television, that a new medium is better served by a new product.

The Daily Mail arrived late to digital ambitions, with its controlling shareholders, the Rothermere family, deciding to seriously pursue a digital strategy in 2008. The Daily Mail's editor, Paul Dacre, a towering figure in British journalism — devil or deacon, depending on your point of view — had little interest in or temperament for digital reinvention. And no urgency to reinvent his paper. If the Mail was experiencing, with all newspapers, a certain decline, it remained — not least because of Dacre's obsessive attention — the most profitable and influential paper in Britain. A tour de force of product design and audience focus.

Development of Mail Online therefore fell to Martin Clarke, a Dacre deputy and protégé. The 50-year-old Clarke, now editor and publisher of Mail Online, is more Fleet Street type — once yelling so hard he gave himself a nose bleed — than digital slickster. But digital journalism is, arguably, quite a natural for a Fleet Street sensibility, where one's fate has always been determined by daily traffic — that is, papers sold. Indeed, Mail Online curiously draws its traffic more from standard newspaper techniques for creating popular appeal, that particular Fleet Street talent — Mail Online is one of the few sites where homepage traffic has consistently grown — than the algorithmic linking techniques for mass market pandering developed by BuzzFeed and others.

Hence, Dacre's Daily Mail, with its immediately identifiably print look and feel, maintains its canny and profitable daily communion with nearly 2 million U.K. readers, in a relationship so intimate and culturally opaque that many readers outside of middle England would likely have trouble deciphering it. At the same time, Clarke's Mail Online, not burdened by the paper's provincialism, has been able to build a wholly new, equally aggressive, middle-market news product for an international audience — retailing as many as 900 stories a day with thousands of photos, and with overseeing editors located in each key market and Clarke himself in constant global transit.

In one sense, this is the consequence of Dacre's rare and serene contentment with his own medium — to say the least, he's not a man in danger of drinking the digital Kool-Aid. And, too, it reflects Britain's opportunistic position for exporting news and media products to the much larger global English market — but scrubbed of too much Britishness, of course. However circumstantial, the result seems the sensible and optimal one: Instead of digital necessarily trying to replace or compete with print, or of both being joined in something of a symbiotic death spiral, two quite separate entities emerge, different products with different functions.

Clarke, once thought to be in the running to replace the 65-year-old Dacre on his retirement, is said to have quietly taken himself out of the race, and to have cast his future with the unfolding of the distinct digital business.

While almost all other newspapers and magazines and many television news organizations continue to be unsure about what business or form they are working in, the Mail is unambiguous. There is profitable print which, although in decline, ought yet to be meticulously tended and protected; and there is digital, which ought to develop its own natural market.

It is at best counterintuitive to think that the same people can do both.