I don’t think Right Minds is for me. This isn’t a tremendous surprise given my political leanings, but it’s not that. I’m used to reading the Mail and being infuriated by their columnists, or irritated by their 55-deck shrill headlines about benefit cheats, gypsies and single mums, but it’s not that either.
No, for once, it’s rather sad to note that the Mail have gone through with something and haven’t done it very well.
It’s not often that the Mail are behind the curve on something, but here it is: their attempt at a multi-authored Huffington Post-style brains trust, to rival Telegraph Blogs, Comment is Free, the Spectator Coffee House and others went live today.
Already nicknamed the “Heffington Post” because of Simon Heffer’s editorship, I was expecting the trademark Mail slickness to set a new benchmark for the rest of us to have to strive for. But no. It’s a bit of a mess, and that’s rather disappointing.
The Mail may be many things to many people, but the one adjective I never thought I’d use about it was “amateurish”. There’s a sticky-back-plastic cobbled-together feel of Right Minds which goes against everything the Mail stands for in terms of quality. There’s a giant photo of Richard Littlejohn at the top of the page, for example, that beams out at you in that mildly terrifying way he does, but it’s been blown up so much it’s gone fuzzy; and Norman Tebbit’s name is spelt wrong — the sort of mistakes that the Mail just doesn’t make.
The title page is littered with so many choices it’s like one of those baffling restaurant menus that you end up staring at for half an hour rather than choosing something to eat. Where to begin? Where to end? Why to bother?
You’re overwhelmed as a punter, drowning in a soup of content, struggling to navigate your way around the competing articles. Perhaps the idea is that you flounder around and end up clicking on stuff as you try to get your bearings; perhaps it’s a case of “more is more” and they’re just trying to deluge us with as much content as possible so we couldn’t possibly not find something to read.
But it doesn’t seem very Daily Mail to me. With the Mail the newspaper – and its staggeringly popular website about Kim Kardashian in a bikini with various less important news articles tacked onto the side – you might dislike or even despise the content, but you always have to admire the professionalism; you might not like what they’re doing but you have to begrudgingly give them their dues for the standards they set. But that’s not the case with Right Minds, and I find that a bit of a let-down. I’m not the Mail’s biggest fan by any stretch of the imagination, but this is just rather disappointing.
That said, what did I find to enjoy? Well, I had fun with this Q and A on spiders with Craig Brown (including a rather delightful line about “Arachnid Correctness gone mad”), and, as is so often the case, the Mail‘s leader column provides the kind of consumer champion voice over banking that cuts right through party affiliation, backed up by this article from Alex Brummer.
I looked in vain for a “token leftie” but all I could find was Roy Hattersley, and he was droning tediously on about HP Sauce so that didn’t help. Perhaps it’s just the way that things have fallen as the venture starts out, but there seems to be a preponderance of men v women. The links don’t really add much either — Guido Fawkes, Iain Dale, John Redwood, it’s the same old usual suspects, the kind of thing that someone just starting out as a Tory blogger would put on their blogroll.
I’m sure it’ll get better. And it’s wrong to imagine that the “Heffington Post” will fail, because it has such huge resources at its disposal that it can’t possibly fail. Doubtless a top team have been behind the scenes working out how to drive as much traffic as possible to the site, and it will boost the Mail‘s ever-growing website presence.
But I had hoped for something a bit more market leading, a bit less safe, a bit more worthy of admiration, even if I didn’t agree with the politics.
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