Picture of host Robin Morgan (left), the Daily Mail’s director of visual storytelling Harry Lewis-Irlam, and Press Gazette UK editor Charlotte Tobitt at Press Gazette’s Future of Media Technology Conference on Thursday 10 September 2026. Picture: ASV Photography for Press Gazette
The Daily Mail ’s multimedia storytelling strand Deep Dive has undergone rapid expansion since it became paywalled in May, hiring ten employees in the last two months to make up an 18-strong team.
The expansion is in response to the success of its multimedia longer read articles, which boast the following impressive average engagement statistics:
— 440,000 views
— two minutes, 45 seconds dwell time
— 60 to 100 new subscribers.
Harry Lewis-Irlam, director of visual storytelling who was hired to launch the project, said: “These things are successful. How do we do more of them? And the answer to how do you do more of them is you hire more people to do them, and you invest in talent and make sure that you’re putting your money where your mouth is.”
In 2025, the Mail said Deep Dive articles were getting 60,000 page views on average .
Deep Dive paywalled in 2026
Deep Dive’s content is assembled by developers, designers and journalists who create visual, interactive pieces on topics from the popularity of baby names to the Epstein Files .
The vision for Deep Dive came from DMG Media publisher and CEO (then Daily Mail editor and publisher) Danny Groom and global editorial director Ben Bailey.
Deep Dive has received multiple awards from Press Gazette, including Innovation of the Year prize at the British Journalism Awards in 2024 and Lewis-Irlam winning Media Innovator of the Year in 2026 .
“We had to spend a couple of years building Deep Dives and putting them out there for free to promote the idea of what they are and why people want to read them, so that when we have put them now behind a paywall, people understand a bit more what they’re getting when they subscribe,” said Lewis-Irlam.
The Deep Dive team also now works with commercial partners and has produced five pieces in association with the Alzheimer’s Society , exploring how the disease affects people through interactive pieces. In the six days after the Mail’s third Deep Dive on the charity, Alzheimer’s Society said it saw a 6,500% increase in page views to its legal and financial advice.
“It’s a no-brainer that you could take these things out to market and promote them… [with] a good return on investment,” said Lewis-Irlam.
He said advertising is better integrated into Deep Dive because “we have full control over it”.
“This is a product that we can take to market and sell to people, so we can make direct revenue from it,” Lewis-Irlam said. “It’s now become a bigger part of the Mail+ strategy as well, so helping to drive subscriptions.”
Deep Dive has gained subscribers through similar methods to the Daily Mail’s wider audience strategy, including social pushes, directly from sponsored posts on Instagram or Facebook “and having real video journalists promoting our work”, said Lewis-Irlam.
Mail+ hit 400,000 subscribers in April , and is aiming to reach one million by October 2028 . A subscription to Mail+ costs 99p a month for five months and £9.99 a month thereafter. The Mail operates a premium content online model whereby some articles are paywalled, but most remain free.
One recent successful Deep Dive for driving subscriptions was an interactive article on the most popular baby names over the past 30 years, with readers able to type in their name to view its popularity over time.
“That one alone, across the US and UK, has driven about 4,500 subscriptions, which is again by far the most subscribed article that we’ve ever done,” Lewis-Irlam said.
Deep Dive’s piece on the popularity of baby names in the past 30 years. Picture: Press Gazette screenshots
Deep Dives with more of a narrative and interactive element do well, said Lewis-Irlam, including using a map to plot story events.
“A lot of our audience really enjoy analysis of crimes,” he added, pointing to an article on Idaho murders that ran with an “interactive house” .
“It’s now such a big vital part of not only the future of the Mail, but it’s obviously something that is proving to be successful. So, they want to double down and make sure they invest in this quality content… the days of hitting as many people as you can as quickly as you can aren’t as lucrative as they used to be,” he said.
‘Company-wide’ project
Deep Dive’s 18-strong team includes four journalists, two of whom are data journalists. It is in the process of hiring an additional two data journalists, bringing the team to 20.
Despite its growth, the Deep Dive team still uses the “breadth of knowledge from the wider newsroom”, with the strand being a “company-wide” project.
“One of our biggest article series that we did recently was one on the Epstein files,” said Lewis-Irlam, adding that the team collaborated with the innovation department, led by director of innovation Chris Clemo, which used AI to scan hundreds of thousands of files and extract relevant information for journalists to examine. Designers and developers then turned the material into an interactive article.
Lewis-Irlam added that AI “covers more of the grunt work” rather than editorial tasks, which are led by associate editor Stephen Matthews.
“When AI is involved, it’s in the background really, and doing the jobs that no one wants to do”.
The Epstein piece was “a really good example of using the technology within the company to be able to produce such a big body of work really in a matter of days”, rather than the weeks or months it would previously have taken.
Each story on Deep Dive takes between a few hours and days to produce, Lewis-Irlam added.
Deep Dive uses visual storytelling platform Shorthand for “lower-level stories”, plus “open-source software and libraries” to avoid unnecessary external costs.
“We’re quite conscious that, although we’re proving profitable and we’re building subscriptions, we still don’t want to spend unnecessarily if we don’t have to… Outside of the talent, it can be as cheap as you need it to be,” said Lewis-Irlam.
He added that there’s not currently “another tabloid-y popular newspaper” that offers something like Deep Dive, adding the Mail is “doing it almost better than some of the broadsheets are”.
“If you want to build subscriptions, target an audience, and give them something to subscribe to, you can’t just do it off pictures and words necessarily anymore… You have to offer them something that’s worth giving your money up every month for, and that’s where our push in visual storytelling really came from.”
Most engaged Deep Dive readers desktop-based
Some 70% of the Mail’s readers are mobile-based, said Lewis-Irlam, but most of Deep Dive’s engaged readers are desktop-based, “so we’re in this place where we can’t focus on one more than the other”.
Deep Dive also faces difficulties introducing advanced technology where certain viewing devices may not support it. The team has recently experimented with 3D models, but older devices may not be able to handle them.
“We can try to cater to everyone, [but] in this tech age there’s no way of being able to guarantee everyone’s going to be able to view something as good as someone else.”
Deep Dive’s success has had an impact on the Daily Mail’s entire visual approach, said Irlam-Lewis.
“How do we become better and improve visually across everything that we do, and it’s just really rewarding to have been a leading part in that, showing that tabloid news doesn’t have to be throwaway news,” he said. “We can do quality content.”
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