Will immersive formats like Deep Dive become standard across all news media?

Read our full interview with Mail Online's director of visual storytelling, Harry Lewis-Irlam 👇

"Not many tabloid newspapers do this kind of storytelling. The people that do it tend to be the more broadsheet papers. It will be interesting to see how many tabloid newspapers start to pick up this level of interactive storytelling."

Looking ahead, Mail Online sees monetisation potential: "There's certainly scope in the future because this is a premium product that either we could start using with advertising or potentially use with paid subscribers, where we've got MailPlus."

The most successful Deep Dive to date? "An article we did about what would happen if Russia tried to start a nuclear war... It was in the prime spot on the page for a whole day. So that one did about half a million views."

Deep Dive is also helping Mail Online reach younger audiences. "The people who are commenting are certainly of the younger generation because they understand interactive content maybe a little bit better and are more naturally drawn to that content."

Production is remarkably efficient: "The actual design and development of the story only takes a few days normally. I've done some stories in a day, others are a bit longer, depending on the length of the story or if we need legal loopholes."

What's surprising is the lean production team. "Each article is normally a core of three people. The entire design and web development is all done by me. And then we tend to have one person who writes the story and one person who edits it."

The concept began two years ago when Daily Mail executives noticed competitors investing in long-form interactive articles. "They could see how much effort people were putting into these sorts of long-form interactive articles, these deep storytelling mediums."

The results speak for themselves: Deep Dive articles average 100,000 views – compared to normally 20,000-30,000 for standard Mail Online news articles – with impressive dwell times of two to eight minutes versus the usual 45 seconds.

Deep Dive stories aren't yet intended as revenue-driving, with no ads or paywalls. One of the goals is rather to create powerful stories that don't rely on social media to engage, says Harry Lewis-Irlam, director of visual storytelling at Mail Online.

Since launch, Mail Online has created about 30 Deep Dives stories published every 2 weeks. One example: "What would REALLY happen if Russia nuked Britain and the US?" — a world war scenario with interactive maps, missile trajectories, and narrative paths that adapt to your nationality.

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Recently, we also published Mick Reed's opinion, in which he argued that to reach a mobile-first audience, you need to do so in a mobile-native format. So why do serious journalists still cringe when someone makes the case for vertical video?

In this FixEd podcast episode, the veteran media leader offers a fresh perspective on humble, collaborative leadership.

Listen to the full conversation to learn more 👇