Sour Alba » Sour Alba by Stewart Kirkpatrick – journalism, Scotland, the web, politics

Downfall vs SNP’s Glenrothes defeat

Stewart — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 16:21:56 +0000

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.

Johnston Press halves scotsman.com’s traffic: well played

Stewart — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 10:37:59 +0000

Johnston Press

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.

That’s about half of the traffic it received in 2007. That’s the lowest audited traffic scotsman.com has had since January 2004.

It’s not like they weren’t warned. But the team that built scotsman.com into a sum far greater than its parts were ignored or removed. Of the team of 20 or so responsible for its success, just two remain at The Hootsmon.

It is widely believed that JP paid over the odds for The Scotsman Publications so they could get their hands on the website. When Tim Bowdler appeared on Newsnight Scotland just after the purchase he mentioned “scotsman.com” in nearly every sentence.

Why then did JP ruin the site?

Interview with Scottish marketing guru Chris Dempsey

Stewart — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 17:59:12 +0000

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.

We are a family publication – apart from the audience

stewart @ w00tonomy — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 16:08:20 +0000

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.”

Now, those who are familiar with the original will spot that there’s something missing from that. Mercifully, the punters stepped into the breach and, en masse, screamed “FUCK YOU” at the appropriate juncture, causing Biffy Clyro to piss themselves laughing.

Why do we insist on censoring language that everone uses?