How The Daily Mail Is Successfully Making the Leap From Web to TV

TV executives take note: turning a popular website into a TV show has proven successful before, and it is again. Ten years ago TMZ launched TMZ on TV. The syndicated entertainment and gossip show is still going strong, averaging a 1.4 household rating. This fall saw the debut of DailyMailTV, a two-years-in-the-making daily program that mirrors the wildly popular news site. Now in its ninth week, DailyMailTV has been the most successful syndicated TV show launch since TMZ on TV in 2007. "It was a long labor, but the delivery has been fantastic," the show's executive producer Carla Pennington told Adweek in an interview earlier this week. "It was a long process in getting it off the ground. We were wanting to make sure we had enough clearance to make a mark," said Pennington. DailyMailTV, which is available in 99.2 percent of the country on 205 stations, is averaging a 1.0 household rating and 1.35 million viewers every day, according to Nielsen data. For Pennington, who also oversees two other syndicated shows, Dr. Phil and The Doctors, taking on DailyMailTV was an easy decision. "I've been obsessed with the website since 2012 and I thought it would make an amazing television show," she said. DailyMail editor and publisher Martin Clarke says the TV show is a top priority for the brand in 2018. "The two big things for us is building the TV show so that we can make some serious money, and short-form liner content for Facebook and Snapchat," Clarke said at Adweek's Elevate: Publishing conference. Clarke is also an executive producer on the show as is Dr. Phil McGraw, and Jay McGraw. "He weighs in every so often, he's got some good ideas," Pennington says of Dr. Phil. One of the executives' easiest decisions was choosing former NFL quarterback and Good Morning America contributor Jesse Palmer to host DailyMailTV. "It was always my vision for it to be a single host and he was one of my top choices," said Pennington. We attended a taping of the show late last month, which is led day-to-day by showrunner Matt Strauss, who joined from PageSix TV. The program is produced at the studios of WPIX-TV, the Tribune-owned New York station which airs DailyMailTV. Tribune and Sinclair were the first station groups to commit to carrying the show. Each morning, following the PIX11 Morning News, crews transform the news set into the DailyMailTV set. Logos are added and lighting is tweaked in a mad rush for the late morning taping. The first feed of the show, which is produced in two half-hours, is at 2 p.m. ET. Pennington says the team of 50 includes former staffers "from the Today show, from 20/20, from Inside Edition, from ET (Entertainment Tonight), Extra." The goal was to find people "who understood what we were trying to put together." Pennington calls the contributions from DailyMail.com reporters "a producer's dream." "We entrenched ourselves in their offices at Astor Place. We had training sessions with the writers to adapt to their storytelling style, including headline writing," she said. "There were days and weeks of producers shadowing reporters." DailyMail.com bills itself as the most-read newspaper website in the world, with more than 400 million visits a month. With a strong start, the next challenge is to negotiate even better timeslots at some stations. In Los Angeles the show airs at 3:30 a.m.; in Atlanta it's on at 1 a.m., in Baltimore it's 11 p.m. "Our CBS sales team is very proactive in meeting with stations and talking about ratings and the demo because the performance of the show speaks for itself," said Pennington. "Stations are very happy with the show so it's all about when the next slot is available and slipping into it." As for balancing three syndicated shows on two coasts, Pennington says, "I have very smart people that work for me. If you surround yourself with smart people, that's the smartest thing that you can do."