"Staffed by kids"

Courtesy of The Spectator Diary, a view of the British media scene from former Daily Mail editor, Paul Dacre.

"Research reveals that 77 per cent of millennials say they never pay for news. Having played a key role in launching the free Metro and free Mail Online, I bear a heavy responsibility for that lethal bacillus — the belief that journalism costs nothing. It doesn’t. Journalism is expensive and to argue otherwise is fake news of the most insidious kind. But then the British media generally is in a dreadful state: Sky, a great British success story, now owned by the Americans; ITV’s shares on the floor amid rumours of a foreign merger; the ubiquitous Johnston Press bankrupt; the cadavers of the once mighty Mirror and Express being asset-stripped; Murdoch’s News UK setting aside around half a billion pounds for damages to phone-hacking victims; the Guardian, with its shrill feminism and hard-left juvenilia, dependent on charity; the Standard (what sublime hypocrisy is its editor George Osborne’s support for Boris) being investigated for its financial links to a Saudi regime that murders journalists; and the BBC, staffed by kids, run by an OAP, obsessed by filling every vacant post with women and dwarfed by the streaming giants. Modesty prevents me from dwelling on one group that still flourishes. The Mail — which never hacked phones — is still highly profitable while Mail Online, the world’s biggest newspaper website, is, after years of heroic support by Jonathan Harmsworth, now making solid money from advertising."