This article is more than 6 years old

This article is more than 6 years old

News Corp Australia has taken aim at its new local online competitor Daily Mail Australia, accusing the news website of plagiarism and labelling its journalists “copy snatchers and parasites”.



One of the exclusive stories News has accused the Daily Mail of copying is a feature about “the best dress a woman can own”, which reportedly took six Daily Telegraph journalists, including a fashion editor with 20 years’ experience, to produce.

Less than a week after the UK’s Mail Online officially rebranded as Daily Mail Australia, in a joint venture with Nine’s digital arm Mi9, News Corp sent a legal letter asking the company to stop using its content or face a lawsuit.

A News Corp spokesman said: "We have taken this action because we believe the Daily Mail Australia is breaching our copyright by lifting substantial slabs of original content from a large number of articles from our mastheads."

Sources from the local operation of the Daily Mail told Guardian Australia the legal threat was “ludicrous” and simply meant News felt threatened and was trying to bully a new entrant on the market.

Since it launched in January, the Daily Mail’s Australian readership has grown to 2.18m unique visits a month and it now ranks sixth in Australian news websites, according to Nielsen. The only News Corp heritage masthead to rank in the top 10 is the Herald Sun, although news.com.au is No. 1.

The new online-only operation is a threat to News Corp because its content is free, while the News Corp stable of tabloids, including the Daily Telegraph and the Herald Sun, have gone behind a metered paywall. This added “insult to injury”, the Australian story said.

Both sides are chasing similar tabloid audiences and similar stories.



In response to the legal threat, a spokesman for Daily Mail Australia told Guardian Australia: “We can confirm that we have received a legal complaint from News and are looking into it. We will reply in due course through our lawyers.”

Quoted in a story in News Corp’s broadsheet The Australian, Daily Telegraph editor Paul Whittaker said the Mail set up in Australia and hired young, inexperienced reporters who relied on the “legwork and dedication” of “real reporters” from News and failed to break their own stories.

“They might acknowledge the source of a story on occasion, but that does not give them carte blanche to take reams of our ­reporting,’’ Whittaker told The Australian.

The new local operation has hired some younger staff but has also poached senior talent from News Corp, including news.com.au editor Luke McIlveen, crime specialist Candace Sutton and Sunday Telegraph news editor Barclay Crawford. McIlveen’s departure sparked a legal challenge from News.

The legal letter sets out 10 examples of stories the Mail has lifted from News tabloids, the report in the Australian says.

News accuses the Mail of providing “only a single attribution before [using] large parts of the story, and in some cases the accompanying graphics”.

The standard for attribution in digital journalism differs widely, but a minimum would be an acknowledgement of the source and a link back to the original.

However, Fairfax Media and some News Corp mastheads do not generally link to other news sources, while the Daily Mail and Guardian Australia do.

The Mail is unashamedly populist, heavy with photographs and celebrity stories and long lurid headlines. It sources a lot of its content from social media and other news outlets.

Last year, Daily Mail and General Trust proprietor Lord Rothermere revealed at a conference that Mail Online journalists aimed to launch stories within three minutes of news breaking on Twitter.

“The Mail Online is a much younger audience, and a much more international audience, whose choice of stories is slightly different as well,” he said. “And they expect things to be very immediate.”

Within months of the Mail’s arrival in Australia the Telegraph’s homepage had changed significantly to mirror the UK model, including more photographs and the trademark “sidebar of shame” or “right rail” of stories down the right-hand side of the website.

News tends to refer to the Daily Mail’s Australian site as “a British newspaper”.

Guardian Australia found two examples of News Corp using stories broken by the Daily Mail without a link back or attribution.

In May, news.com.au used quotes from an exclusive Daily Mail story by experienced crime reporter Sutton: “The day I was kidnapped and beaten by Jamie Gao”.



“Breaking his silence, Jaiweu Yi, 19, told a British newspaper that he was kidnapped over a love split involving a friend, 18-year-old Alex Li,” news.com.au reported.

Another story, which ran in several News papers, included screenshots of pictures sourced by the Daily Mail of the English cricketer Stuart Broad paddling in Sydney Harbour.



In the latest Nielsen rankings for news websites, news.com.au was in first place with an audience of 3.67m, followed by smh.com.au with an audience of 3.61m and Ninemsn third with 3.1m.

Daily Mail Australia rose from 2.08m in April to a record 2.18m last month.

Guardian Australia, also a free site, posted a record audience result of 1.77m to finish in ninth place.

The Herald Sun finished in seventh spot with an audience of 2.03m, while the Daily Telegraph and Courier Mail were not in the top 10.