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.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Fi Russell // Feb 9, 2009 at 10:34 pm
A bit behind on things (I had an internet breakdown last week) I have I just read your fab rhetoric on the way forward for newspapers such as The Herald and The Scotsman. I can’t understand why their leaders are so blinking dim about this. Anyway, there is no point in me preaching to you as you said it all. I used to be assistant ed of the Herald but left when things started to really head downwards a few years back. I’m now a freelance writer with a specialism in adventure, outdoors, fitness and health. But I’m now writing more and more for websites. I’m in the process of sorting a my own website that will grow (hopefully) from my (admittedly rather basic) blog. Webs are so much more fun, lively and in-the-minute than any newspaper. Thanks for saying out loud what I’ve been going on about to pals for years… PS I think we may have met at a leaving do years back. But then again, there have been a lot of Scottish newspaper leaving dos!
2 Alan Rodgers // Sep 12, 2009 at 3:12 am
Oh walie waile waile The Herald’s old site worked and now they have gone and fixed it. I haven’t received an Email news letter since it started and they don’t respond to emails, tried re-registering to no avail. The new site is cumbersome, time consuming and a ‘Disneyish’ attempt for popularity. Now I have to reluctantly rank The Scotsman’s web site marginly better. Would appreciate your current comments . Thanks. Alan
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