Less racy, more racing and a new sponsored AI chatbot are all part of the mix for a changing Daily Star.
Press Gazette spoke to editor Ben Rankin as the dust settled on company-wide cutbacks which have seen the Star lose around a third of its editorial team.
The Reach-owned tabloid brand has been led by a new editor-in-chief since the start of March. Rankin is formerly Reach nationals audience director who has overseen digital strategy for the Mirror, Express, Star and OK! and helped set up the Mirror, Express and Irish Star in the US.
Three months later the Daily Star launched a major print and digital redesign that included the end of its page three models. Rankin also introduced the strapline “News with a wink” which was voted on by staff.
In an interview at Reach’s Canary Wharf headquarters last week, Rankin told Press Gazette the brand was in a “pretty good place” and had a “talented team” under his predecessor Jon Clark.
But Rankin said his appointment “was always going to be about change. I made a lot of change quite quickly… there was plenty to get stuck into.”
He said some of the work around combining the Daily Star’s print and digital teams had been done previously but “there was clearly plenty to do… My job was to bring those two sides of the office together and transform the newsroom into one team, even more digitally focused, and to get the numbers moving in the right direction.”
The Daily Star newsroom has gone from being about 70 people in February to about two-thirds of that size following the Reach-wide restructure that has just taken place.
This means the Star will start to get some breaking news and other major stories from a central newsdesk team but that it will continue to have a newsroom of its own producing content that fits the brand.
Rankin said: “We’ve lost some people, some good people, and some people that have worked for the Star for a long time… We’ve got to prove to the business that we’re commercially important, and with a bit of luck, further down the line, we’ll expand again.
“The video team is growing. So in some ways, the team is getting smaller, but in other areas, the team’s being invested in.”
Daily Star: A ‘serious newspaper in our own way’
The website refresh included a new platform based on making it more user-friendly and a redesign including new fonts and the ability to change colours in headlines to emphasise certain words.
Rankin said the visual change was “desperately needed… we needed a site that the look matched the tone of the content, which is fun and cheeky.”
In print, the masthead was updated for the first time in 15 years and the strapline was changed from “proud to love animals”.
Rankin said “news with a wink” was “more fitting for the Star. We have been a serious newspaper for almost 50 years, but we do it in our own way, and we’re proud of that.”
The content mix has also changed in both print and digital.
In the newspaper, Rankin said, it now better matches the website content with more hard news and big stories. This year was the Daily Star’s first time attending the political party conferences in 20 years.
“The team really enjoy doing the cheeky stuff but they like hard news as well,” he said, citing front pages since his arrival on the team like the full page for the death of Pope Francis I in April.
The team have also begun to do more campaigning journalism, for example teaming up with fellow Reach title the Manchester Evening News to fundraise for two mental health charities following the death of boxer Ricky Hatton. That campaign has raised £3,000 in the past month.
The Daily Star Sunday also launched a Balls To Walls campaign to make football pitch areas safe for players following the death of Billy Vigar who died after colliding with a brick structure during a match.
Rankin said the campaigns give readers “a slightly different take on the brand. It just broadens the appeal… that’s again, adding, I hope, another string to the brand’s bow, and just saying, as much as we’re going to try and entertain you and inform you, also there’s some really important things you need to know about the society we live in.”
The print newspaper has also introduced a seven-day-a-week horse racing pullout “to really challenge the market and say, okay, we are number one for racing”.
That was decided, Rankin said, because “racing is one of the things that moves the dial for the Star, always has done”.
Why Daily Star dropped page three models
Rankin also took the decision to drop page three models (who had been scantily-dressed but not topless since 2019). He said: “I wanted the paper to be more inclusive. I just felt we need to move on.”
This was in part because the newsbrand’s audience is much more balanced than many people think, he said: about 52% male and 48% female. “We needed, and we want, female readers.”
He added that it is also the youngest audience of the three nationals at Reach, with 40% of the print and digital audience aged under 44.
Page three of the newspaper now leads with picture-led showbiz stories instead, and even featured footballer Trent Alexander-Arnold in his underwear when he put out a Calvin Klein advert. “So we’ve moved on from page three girls to page three fellas. If you can do that and you get away with it, you can do anything.”
The “heartland” of the print audience is in the North West of England but Rankin noted that online it has a “big readership in London” and gets “very healthy pickup for our size” on news aggregator the Drudge Report, helping to give it a US audience.
“It’s a working class newspaper. It’s read by people who like racing and football. That we know. But it’s more than that, and that was great to find out.”
The Daily Star’s print circulation fell below 100,000 in September to 97,878, down 4% month on month and 18% year on year.
The Daily Star on Sunday is on a similar trajectory, down 2% month on month in September and 16% year on year to 54,101.
But Rankin said that although the circulation decline is continuing, “what we’re seeing is that every change that we’ve made has been a positive one, and that we haven’t lost anything. And in a world where circulation is tricky for everyone, it’s been great to see that we can cover a hard news story and the same story can be on everyone else’s front page, and we hold our sale.
“So we do as well as, or if not better, than we would have done previously. So I think that’s enough of a stamp of approval as anything… we’ve held onto our share.”
Daily Star: Less racier content, more racing
The Daily Star website has also moved away from “racier” content, Rankin said, noting: “You look at some of the stuff that the Star covered traditionally, we’re doing less of, and that’s a deliberate move.”
He suggested that this could also help with the brand’s Google visibility, which is already improving following some concerted SEO work. “The growth potential there for us is massive, if we get it right.”
Other content changes include publishing more racing content online. “We haven’t done much digitally with horse racing and that’s one of the challenges we’re going to have is – alright, it’s great for print, but how do we get new younger readers interested in something that we think is really key to the brand?” Rankin said.
They have just tested out working with a racing influencer to see if this could build a social video audience. More will follow in that area in 2026, he added.
Darts has similar potential, with Rankin describing it as a “an area that we’re keen on and we’d like to own”, again with ideas brewing in video.
The Daily Star is also “rebooting” its showbiz team to make it a “much more digitally-focused, forward-thinking operation,” Rankin said. “At the moment they could be more joined up.”
Digitally, the Daily Star has been among the top-growers for monthly audience, minutes spent and page views in the UK for the past few months.
In September, it had a UK website audience of 7.7 million according to Ipsos iris – down 6% month on month from a peak of 8.2 million in August but up 150% in a year from 3.1 million in September 2024.
Rankin said October could match August “so it’ll either be the best month we’ve had or the second best.” In August the Daily Star was the 21st biggest news website in the UK by audience size, up from 33rd a year earlier.
The encouraging thing about August, he said, was that although there were healthy numbers from sport content and the transfer window in particular, “it wasn’t just that. A couple of months on, there is no transfer window, and we found other places to get audience.”
Rankin did note, however: “I don’t expect, and I didn’t expect, the numbers just to go up and up and up and up every month. It doesn’t work like that. You’ve just got to every little bit layer on layer and just keep going.”
Daily Star growth: Marginal gains and saying yes to everything
Rankin said the growth can be credited to “all the little things” the team are doing.
“So it’s a lot of marginal gains, and it’s a lot of bringing the team together more: asking them to focus on the basics even more gets you a long way.
“I’ve been doing this a long time. I do know what works: even in a quickly changing media world, doing the things that I was taught when I was first a trainee reporter in Milton Keynes, a lot of that still applies. We’ve got some good people who work hard, and if you show them a little bit of success, they like it, and they hunt it down even more.”
Rankin also noted that he has “said yes to everything, pretty much, from every part of the business, since I came back”.
This has meant trying things out such as Taboola’s AI-powered answer engine “Deeper Dive”, which provides AI-generated answers based on Daily Star content as well as a mixture of internal and paid-for sponsored links.
Rankin said this was done “in the spirit of the Star being somewhere that we say yes to things in the company, so let’s have a go. Let’s see if there’s any value in this whatsoever.” It is too early to answer that question, he added.
He added: “Change is brilliant but awful at the same time as we’re going through at the moment, and we’ve got to try things whether that’s content, that’s supporting commercial. I’ll sound like Mr Reach here, but that’s about us hooking up with product, commercial teams, IT teams, saying okay, we’ll do it. If it breaks the site, it’s coming down.”
Rankin said the targets were not just about increasing page views but they want “all numbers to go up” including affiliate shopping clicks and off-platform views on MSN (which has seen record monthly audiences this year).
[From April: Facebook increasing as part of social traffic mix after algorithm change, data shows]
Facebook revenue is increasing, with video revenue for July up threefold compared to June.
Rankin said the Star is “third or fourth best in the business for Facebook numbers each month” and that it is doing well out of the new content monetisation scheme introduced earlier this year in which publishers can get paid for on-platform interactions. He added that the type of content the Star produces “really resonates” with a Facebook audience.
Rankin also said the Star is punching above its weight for videos on Tiktok and Instagram within Reach and that it is “cutting through” on both Reddit and Threads – with both sending referral traffic back to the website.
[Read more: Why publishers should worry about growing reliance on Google Discover]
Looking into 2026, Rankin expects the Daily Star to trial digital subscriptions from Q1 as Reach puts “serious focus” on paid-for online content for the first time.
He said that would “give us the chance to showcase some content that is very Daily Star”.
Asked where he wants the brand to be in one year, Rankin said: “I’d love to be able to say to you that we put a lot of hard work in, and we’ve managed to hold on to as much of the [print] sale as we thought we could. We’ve grown into video, really lent into it, and done some good stuff. Campaigns have grown, for example. Subscriptions, I’d love to be a big success for the Star.
“Anything that just says, okay, this is the brand that’s got a future, and it’s a fun brand, and it’s different, and it’s for young and old. It’s not just for the guy drinking a pint of ale in the pub, reading the racing pull out. It’s got something for everyone.
“So we’ve got some big ideas, and we’ve got some serious talent. I think there’s half a chance we can make a success of it.”
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