This interview was first in the Podcast Business Journal newsletter, with the latest podcast news and data. Subscribe free today.
Jamie is Head of Podcasts for DMG — this interview has been lightly edited for style and readability
James Cridland: Who is DMG?
Jamie East: DMG is the company that own and publish the Daily Mail, Metro, New Scientist, i news - a plethora of publications. I was brought in to look after the Daily Mail’s slate of podcasts. I started in August last year - about fourteen months ago, although on some days it feels like ten years and others it feels 10 minutes.
JC: What’s your background? You have a radio background, I think?
JE: A bit of a jack of all trades, James - I started off in online publishing, ran a couple of websites, and sold them to Endemol. That brought me into TV, where I spent a few years in front of the camera, then a few years behind the mic at Virgin Radio, and I taught radio, too. Then I slipped into podcasting, and did that for a couple of years. Then the pandemic hit, and everyone became a podcaster. I’ve stayed doing that since, and I feel like I’ve found my home.
JC: Since you’ve been with DMG, I’ve seen a lot of new shows coming out. Downloads of Daily Mail podcasts have soared to over 32 million. Of course, there was The Trial - but what else are you doing that’s succeeding?
JE: We’ve built The Trial into a franchise now. It’s on its 11th series, and it’s absolutely flying. I think the key is working out how to work best with the papers, and how to work best with Mail Online. They’ve already got huge existing audiences. They have great data on who that audience is and what they like. And it was a good exercise to spend a few months having a look at that and working out what was going to fit. There was a lot of low hanging fruit, a lot of easy wins. Not all of them worked out: I’m a big fan of failing quickly and not adding to the podcast graveyard. I think the ones that work stick around pretty quickly.
32 million is a huge number to produce in just two years. There’s no real secret to it. You’re long in the tooth as well, James: you know it’s all about the storyteller. As long as you get the storytelling right, there’s not much else that can go wrong.
JC: So what sort of shows have you been launching? I’ve seen some very journalism-led shows like the the the Lucy Letby trial. But you’ve also launched more entertainment-led shows as well, haven’t you?
JE: You’ve got the Daily Mail newspaper, which has a certain audience which we service really well with things like The Trial. A lot of the forthcoming slate over the next couple of months is leaning more into that. But then there’s the Mail Online audience, which is just absolutely massive - we are the biggest news publisher on TikTok as well, we’ve just broken 20 million followers on TikTok. So there’s no typical Mail reader or Mail listener or Mail viewer: they cover almost every single demo. So, if you’re a twentysomething in New York, then you have a very different experience and a very different touchpoint to the Mail brand. It’s a blessing, because you can genuinely find an audience in any genre that we want to try and experiment with, which is also a curse because you feel as though you’ve got to try everything.
JC: Now, you mentioned New York - the news is that you are expanding to the US. What has what’s the reason for that?
JE: We’ve got a massive audience in the US. There’s dailymail.com, which is the the US brand of what we know in the UK as MailOnline. It’s a huge, huge brand now, and it’s also really quite a different brand. MailOnline has its own perceptions of what it is and what it does in the UK. But over in the in the US, it’s seen as this cool new kid on the block. It’s quite exciting to be able to tap into that. And with the Diddy scandal that kicked off about six weeks ago, we were able to to leap onto that. We were already in full production for a series on Diddy six months ago using a brilliant journalist from the Mail based in LA called Marjorie Hernandez. I have the luxury of being able to phone up the person that knows the most about that - they’re on our books. They’re really keen on experimenting and having a go at making a podcast. We’ve got the facilities to do it, we’ve got the people, we’ve got the willing and the desire. So it a pretty straightforward leap and using The Trial brand to do that has been great.
So we’ve launched The Trial of Diddy in the US; that will eventually become The Trial USA. And we’ll cover we’ll cover more and more trials as they happen. And we’re doing the same in Australia with The Trial of Erin Patterson - the mushroom lady. Both fascinating cases and huge public interest.
I’m not underestimating the scale of of trying to launch in the States. It’s a hugely solidified market compared to the UK. It runs very differently: they run on volume whereas in the UK, we don’t have that volume, we have to work on engagement and and creating a community. So it’s going to be a fun one.
JC: The Trial of Diddy is a top ten hit all over the world, and it has boosted your overall U.S. podcast traffic by over 25%. You can cross-promote, I guess, other shows from that one big hit to increase all of your slate, is that right?
JE: Yes. It was always an ambition and a plan. There’s no point in launching all these standalone podcasts. We’ve got the ability to build a network. The best way for discovering a podcast is word of mouth. But the second best is by promoting it on the podcast. There’s no better way of doing that. We know that those people and those listeners are engaged. They listen to almost every single second of every single episode of The Trial. So it’s not a big stretch to imagine someone who’s interested in the trial of Lucy Letby would also be interested in the trial of Erin Patterson, and that’s proved true with the U.S. traffic: The Trial has been huge in the UK, huge in Australia as well - 23% of the traffic comes from Australia - but a very small percentage historically came from the US. So to go from 3% to 28% or whatever it is with the launch of The Trial of Diddy is exactly what we want: but I don’t want to stop there.
JC: When you’re talking about expanding your podcast operation to the US, this isn’t just from an editorial point of view. You’ve actually got people on the ground there, you’ve got offices there where you’re actually making this stuff?
JE: We’ve got our offices in New York, a base in L.A. and D.C. as well. We’re starting to plan about staffing that up permanently. I’m really looking forward to doing it because all of a sudden you can have a 24 hour operation. If you’ve got someone based in Melbourne or Sydney, and New York and London, there’s not an hour where where you can’t have a team working away. So the efficiencies are brilliant. You don’t have to have all the expertise in every single pocket - our artwork may always come from London. Our legal may always come from Australia. The beauty of the DMG empire is that is that we can really utilise the international bases that we have. So we will have producers in each.
JC: It’s not a particularly well known thing that The New York Times Daily, for example, is edited in the UK.
JE: Yeah, exactly.
JC: In terms of the the podcast slate to come, are we are we expecting an equivalent of the of The Daily, or what other shows are you working on?
JE: You know, I get asked that a lot about The Daily. I cut my teeth in in news podcasting over the past four years with The Smart 7 which is still going strong, which I launched with Liam Thompson back in 2020.
Daily News is really difficult to do. It’s really expensive, it’s really time consuming, it’s really labour intensive and the gains nowadays are pretty small. I don’t have any personal plans in doing it. I’m a big advocate of AI and how we can use that in terms of efficiencies, but at the moment, no plans for daily news.
We will be leaning into a lot more of the journalism. We’ve got big plans in the true crime stuff - I’ll give you the exclusive on all of that when I’m ready to announce it all - but there’s big plans coming in January and February for that. There are hundreds and hundreds of incredible journalists working for DMG, and there is also an unbelievable archive. So in terms of historic cases, historic true crime, and celebrity and showbiz, it’s rich pickings there. We will definitely be leaning into that.
A lot of returning series are coming back; and some haven’t made it back. No shame in that. I wish more people would do that. I’m a big fan of trying out lots and lots of different things.
JC: And the monetization side: these will be ad supported or will there be a premium subscription as well?
JE: At the moment ad support - we’ve got a big commercial team behind it, and we’re lucky to have some big commercial partners coming on board.
JC: Do you sell these shows directly in the US, or are you working with a partner?
JE: We’ve got a good commercial team in the States. Dominic Williams, our chief commercial officer in the UK, has been out there the past couple of weeks, starting to put the feelers out for how we build that. At the moment we’ve only got one title that’s predominantly angled at the U.S. So as they grow, then the team will grow. It’s a different ball game: the whole “MailChimp” angle is a winner over there, but less successful in the UK because again it’s volume: when you’ve got an audience of 300 million, it’s worth doing. Over in the UK, less so.
JC: Well, it’s great to speak with you. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.
JE: Thanks, James.
Get interviews like this every week, plus podcast business news and data. Subscribe to our newsletter free today.