Sour Alba

Saor Alba means “free Scotland” in Gaelic. Sour Alba is closer to home.

I am a Scottish online journalist, digital publishing consultant and lecturer. I joined my first dotcom just before the lastminute.com share price crashed. (Remember that?) Things got better after that. Eventually.

Nauseating self-promotion ahead, please skip in the interests of good taste:

In my seven years as Editor of scotsman.com, traffic increased tenfold to four million unique users a month. The site became one of Google’s top worldwide news sources. The site won the Newspaper Society’s best daily newspaper site award three times. In the Newspaper Awards, it was listed ahead of papers like the FT. Our original online content saw scotsman.com shortlisted for several national and international journalism awards. Mediaweek rated it as the sixth biggest news site in the UK. Hitwise said it was the eighth. And the UK Press Gazette listed me as one of the top 50 people shaping online journalism. That was just before the UKPG shut down…

(For more in this ego-stroking vein, see my LinkedIn profile.)

In 2004, I wrote a column predicting the second dotcom boom and jokingly promising that I would soon be charging companies to talk about “generating granular paradigms” and “utilising clickable eyeballs” - phrases I culled from the excellent Web Economy Bullshit Generator. As a consultant I now do this in all seriousness … and I understand what they mean.

I believe that - thanks to atomisation and disintermediation - we are about to see a Golden Age of journalism. No really.