Daily Mail

The Daily Mail falls under the category of “Websites I’m Addicted to Visiting” but frankly that’s a misnomer since it’s really the only website I’m addicted to visiting. Secretly, I think all Classics are big gossips, but as a sensitive Classic Freedom, I prefer to read tabloids and only gossip about strangers. The Daily Mail is a British tabloid’s online version but they also have a U.S. page. They are almost always ahead of every news website. And as for celebrity gossip, fuhgeddaboudit, they have celebrity stuff at least a week before People Magazine hits the newsstands.

I save money, if not time, by reading this daily because I almost never purchase gossip magazines anymore because it’s almost always a repeat story. How’s that for a frugal Classic’s justification for reading this website obsessively? But I do have my limits. There are only so many stories one can read about the Kardashians before you start to worry that you might be actually lowering your IQ.

A little history from Wikipedia on one of my secret guilty pleasures — although not so secret anymore:

The Daily Mail was Britain’s first daily newspaper aimed at the newly-literate “lower-middle class market resulting from mass education, combining a low retail price with plenty of competitions, prizes and promotional gimmicks,” and the first British paper to sell a million copies a day. It was, from the outset, a newspaper for women, being the first to provide features especially for them, and is still the only British newspaper whose readership is more than 50% female.

And make no mistake, this thing is geared to women. Their human interest stories are always about some poor mom dying of cancer or a child who dies in a well meaning grandmother’s care. The format is headline stories on the right, which are quasi news — human interest pieces mixed in with things about how our global economy is going to hell in a handbasket that make me feel somewhat globally informed. And then to the right there’s the patronizingly named “Femail,” which gives you all the celebrity gossip that anyone could possibly churn out in 24 hours.

As for what personality types like lowbrow gossip, unfortunately, we have NOT cracked this code yet. I would say that in general Smart Structures rarely waste their time with this sort of stuff. So, basically every other personality type who appreciates gossip and breaking headlines — whether secretly or not-so-secretly — will most definitely find themselves coming back for more. Oh and maybe Fun Structures would find this boring. They’ve got better things to do than read about what other people are doing.