Conservative Convergence : The Daily Mail and the Making of Modern Media

Conservative Convergence highlights and examines the integral role of British newspapers in the development of media technologies across the 20th century, from early radio to commercial television, from newsreels to educational filmstrips.

The newspaper today is an intermedial enterprise, circulating news and generating revenues through its websites, videos, podcasts, and events. This is not a new phenomenon. In foregrounding the work of the Daily Mail since its establishment in 1896, Tom Rice reveals how conservative newspapers pioneered, produced, and progressively adopted new technological innovations and new forms of media to boost their readership and revenue and to consolidate, project, and extend their own broadly conservative values. Rice uncovers surprising episodes across the 20th century, whether exploring early film screenings through the Daily Mail cinema van, the journey of the Daily Mail broadcasting yacht to seaside towns in the 1920s, or the newspaper’s foray into cable television in the 1990s.

This expansive, often messy, history positions the newspaper beyond the printed page—reaching audiences in schools, exhibitions, and overseas through loudspeakers, election screens, or 16mm projectors—and, through extensive archival research, invites us to reexamine how these related media technologies came to be. In illuminating the historical connections between the Daily Mail and new forms of media, Conservative Convergence ultimately charts the emergence, evolution, and endurance of Britain’s modern media system.