Mail Men: Jonathan Harmsworth, 4th Viscount Rothermere, Chairman of the Daily Mail and General Trust, enjoys a chinwag with Breaker outside RedBird’s AGM. (Credit: William Farrington/Copyright: Breaker Media)
Welcome to the latest edition of Breaker. If this email has been forwarded, you can subscribe here and send your questions and complaints here. If you have a tip contact the 24/7 Breaker Tip Hotline via text or Signal # 551 655 2343. Anonymity guaranteed!
In tonight’s edition, after three rounds of layoffs, Breaker has learned that The Daily Mail’s U.S. operation is in crisis mode. Tonight, we reveal a HR investigation, a bizarre situation involving a Mail journalist who was also an OnlyFans creator, and the reaction of Daily Mail EIC Ted Verity when he recently visited the Manhattan office from London.
Plus, Condé staffers are prepping for a rally outside the company’s One World Trade Centre offices Wednesday night in the hopes of having the “fired four” reinstated. We have scene reports from a book party for New York Post investigative reporter Isabel Vincent and from the live recording of the Pivot pod with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway, and Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie serves up his Hot Source.
Finally, we are chuffed to join Vanity Fair as a Contributing Editor. Global Editorial Director Mark Guiducci announced a raft of new hires Tuesday, including Ta-Nehisi Coates as senior staff writer, and New York Times Magazine’s Adrienne Green as executive editor. Our first piece for the magazine hits newsstands next month.
Mentioned tonight: Lord Rothermere, Martin Clarke, Gerard Greaves, Katie Davies, Ted Verity, Larry Ellison, Lachlan Murdoch, Joy Reid, Jake Lahut, Alma Avalle, Jasper Lo, Ben Dewey, Stan Duncan, Ben Mullin, Katie Robertson, Greg Gutfeld, Emily Sundberg, Christopher Williams, Lionel Barber, Jim Bankoff, Ramin Setoodeh, Natalie Korach, Corbin Boiles, Jeremy Barr, Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, Virginia Evans, Shawn McCreesh, Kim Williams, David Marchese, Brian Steinberg, Kat Rosenfield, Michael Savage, Lewis Goodall, Janice Min, David Rhodes, Lauren Starke, Aude White, Jessica Sibley, Susan Li, Jim Edwards, Sara Fischer, DeRay Mckesson, Jeane MacIntosh, Dan Mangan, Anahita Moussavian, Rich Wilner, Melissa Klein, Lydia Moynihan, Margi Conklin, Jeanette Settembre, and more.
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Sidebar of Shame
(Exclusive.) Late last month, employees at DMG Media, the parent company of The Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, received a rude shock in their inboxes.
Head of HR, Kara Riley-Dudley, advised staff that open enrollment for their 2026 health benefits would soon start, but there was a surprise development buried in the missive.
“Beginning in 2026, employees will contribute a portion of the premium cost for coverage,” before going on to state that it is “a common practice across most organizations,” the email obtained and reviewed by Breaker stated.
Daily Mail employees had come to factor the perk into their pay. So the news that they would now have to pay part of their premium was widely viewed as the equivalent of taking a pay cut.
For some staffers, particularly those on a family plan, the new cost runs into the high hundreds of dollars, if not low thousands.
The changes have been viewed internally as the latest cost-cutting measure for a newsroom that has been battered with at least three waves of layoffs in recent months.
As Breaker first reported, around 20 people were laid off on Thursday from the company, mostly on the commercial side.
Amongst those impacted were the EVP of Advertising and the Head of U.S. Communications. That followed an editorial cull in September that saw 15 journalists lose their jobs.
Now Breaker has learned in recent weeks Editor-in-Chief of The Daily Mail, Ted Verity, made a…
The Condé Four’s Fight
(Exclusive.) The Condé Union is preparing for a rally Wednesday night near the company's One World Trade Center offices as the fight to reinstate "the fired four" as they have become known ramps up.
Wired's Jake Lahut, Bon Appétit's Alma Avalle, The New Yorker's Jasper Lo, and Condé Nast Entertainment's Ben Dewey were all fired after marching on Chief People Officer Stan Duncan’s office last Thursday.
The union is expecting some 400 people, made up of the Condé, New Yorker, NY Times, and Tech guilds, to turn out near the company's One World Trade Center offices.
Breaker has learned Condé has taken the drastic step of banning…
The Breaker Pod: Alex Heath on Newsroom AI adoption and the “new Murdochs”
Tech journalist Alex Heath, who just months ago struck out on his own and started a newsletter, Sources, and co-hosts the ACCESS podcast, is this week's guest on The Breaker Pod.
From Super Burrito in Greenwich Village (cheers to the owners, Eugene, Max, and Griffin, for having us down), we talked about the convergence of tech and media companies, with David Ellison acquiring Paramount, and with his dad, Larry’s, firm eyes on a TikTok takeover.
“The Ellison thing is really interesting. Larry Ellison, his dad, and David, like they are about to maybe become the new Murdochs, so to speak.” Heath told us. "You could have Bari (Weiss) running CNN and the TikTok algorithm theoretically at some point.”
On a larger scale, Heath told us that some media organizations have been desperate to implement AI, rushing to do so and often with catastrophic results.
Catch more in this week's episode of The Breaker Pod. Make sure you check us out and subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your pods.