Sour Alba

Alex Salmond’s reaction to the Glenrothes by-election defeat imagined as the much parodied bunker scene from Downfall. Bad taste, lots of swearing, devastatingly hilarious regardless of your politics. Help me, I am crying with uncontrollable laughter.

“I need a chicken korma.” Pure unadulterated genius.

It’s 18 months since I left scotsman.com. I knew the new Johnston Press redesign was, to put it very, very, mildly, unworthy to lick the boots of the 2001-2007 model.

I also knew that traffic would tank. I warned Tim Bowlder, the JP chief executive, of this face to face saying the JP redesign would lose “millions of page views and hundreds of thousands of users”. My warning was ignored and a JP apparatchik later explained that I had not understood how good their plans were.

Well, we can finally see how good their plans were. Audited traffic figures for scotsman.com have finally escaped into the light of day. According to ABCe, the site I edited for seven years now gets about 2 million unique users a month.

Did an interview with Chris Dempsey of Registers of Scotland for my agency. Chris worked for the Scottish Government, Executive and Office for many, many years and has some interesting points about the state of marketing north of the Border.

God bless Biffy Clyro. And may He also bless the audience who watched them at a recent BBC Introducing set at the Reading and Leeds Festival.

The Ayrshire rockers performed a really sweet acoustic cover of Rage Against The Machines “Killing in the name of”. Perhaps due to it being on TV ‘n’ that, the group sang the famed repeating chorus at the end thus: “Ooo-oooo I won’t do you what you tell me.”

Very funny wee film about cars at a zebra crossing being faced with a seemingly never-ending parade of pedestrians in fancy dress.

My second podcast. Longer than the first, now with added gratuitous and unsubstantiated claims of bestiality. Maybe.

 

 Sour Alba podcast 2: Scottish politics and donkey sex [5:13m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I believe this is the first anyway… It’s about my experiences being embedded in the civil service for a while.

 

 Sour Alba podcast 1: Historic first and the civil service [2:23m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Strange story from The Times. Chinese TV is reporting that a tourist has filmed a group of monsters in Lake Kanasi in the Xinjiang region. As with all such videos, it’s grainy and shaky but there’s something there. Could be a family of beasties. Could be a hoax.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgaihUBaTIM&rel=1]

The rush to video is one of the Big Ideas in print journalism at the moment. Newspaper companies see the bottom falling out of the ad market and they see sales graphs they could ski down. Rightly, they are embracing the web as the path to salvation.

Wrongly, too many are doing this by demanding that newsrooms “do video” without providing the necessary training and bodies. I am baffled by this approach: nothing looks worse than cheap telly – and where is the evidence that there is huge public demand for wobbly news bulletins with the production values of a Soviet-era home movie?

For video to work for non-AV news providers, they need to learn how to become … err … AV news providers. It sounds so simple and yet and yet… Training is at the heart of getting this right- and doing that properly is not cheap.

One area where costs can be cut is kit. I shot this clip of a friend up Ben Nevis on an Olympus digital camera. Now, the lighting is terrible, the camerawork wobbly and the production values redolent of the Trabant facory circa 1971, but the quality of the picture is pretty good.

You can buy these cameras for about £100 on eBay. Throw in free video editing software (iMovie, Windows Movie Maker or Avid Free DV if you want to be really professional) and you have all the tools you need for a basic video news service. Providing you know what you’re doing.