Sour Alba

I await with interest the launch of Herald Scotland.

I have not held back from criticising Johnston Press’s handling of my baby scotsman.com but I see signs that what the Herald are about to do will make JP’s decisions look like the greatest internet wisdom since Tim Berners-Lee saw a spider making a trap for flies. (Actually that might have been Robert the Bruce but you know what I mean.)

My pessimism is based on four warning signs:

1) A new URL: According to the excellent AllMediaScotland, the Herald plans to amalgamate its existing sites to create one seven-day operation. The key risk here is what happens to the current sites and, crucially, all the inbound links and search engine reputation they have built up over the years. If the old sites are junked then all those inbound links (vital for search engine reputation) will be lost.  Also, their very valuable search engine page ranks will be lost. Now there are ways and means of sending traffic to  new address. But even a 301 redirect can take months to take effect completely (thus losing valuable traffic and revenue). Also, given that the Herald and Sunday Herald’s web addresses have different structures a redirect might struggle.

But if they run the old and new sites in parallel then they face a massive search engine penalty for having duplicate content.

And if they launch the new URL without a ton of content, it will lose the huge benefit of the Heralds’ exisitng content.

In short, once you ‘ve got a URL stick with it. Sod rebranding.

2) Flash: The holding page is a search-engine-invisible Flash animation. An emphasis on “looking pretty” over “working properly” is no a good sign for whatever’s coming next.

3) Tag line: The marketing slogan for the new site appears to be: “Make it home”. That smacks of “make this your hompage”, which has been made hopelessly outdated by bookmarking, decent search engines and social networks.

4) The suggestion of charging. No, no, no, no. No matter what Rupert Murdoch says, the arguments for charging for content are all to do with what newspapers would like and not what readers will do. If you put your content behind a payment barrier, people will not pay you. They will go to a free site that offers content similar to yours. This is not an argument about quality – though the Herald’s has taken a big hit by cutting so many staff – but about how the customer behaves.

Now, all these indications might be off the mark but, for me, they point to worrying times ahead for Scotland’s online media.

I used to be a Sunday tabloid journalist. My heart was never in it as I couldn’t be bothered getting worked up about stating the bleeding obvious and then pretending to be outraged by it.

Apparently, it turns out that not everyone has a strictly vanilla  sex lives. Whodathunkit? Criminals do nasty things. Lawks a mercy. And teenagers get drunk and take drugs. Hold the front page!

At the weekend I saw something that took that last gem to a new level. The Scottish Sunday Express splashed on Anniversary shame of Dunblane survivors. Many others have already kicked this crap and its author to pieces and it’s been pulled from the alleged paper’s sorry excuse for a site but I am still angry enough about it to put my oar/boot in as well.

As with most Sunday tab yarns, further investigation revealed that this was a flammed up piece of crap. No surprises there but it was the sheer scale of the flamming coupled with bad taste and hypocrisy that sticks in the craw.

In essence, the “story” reveals that a couple of Dunblane survivors are 18 now and have been using social networking sites to talk about drink, drugs and sex. This, claims the piece, “shames” the memory of what happened.

In essence, these kids are being condemned for being normal teenagers. When they were very, very young they went through a hellish ordeal that the rest of us cannot imagine. One of the kids in the story was shot. These teenagers have performed a miracle in A) still being alive and B) functioning like everyone else. They should be celebrated or, better yet, left alone.

This is what we have come to: desperate hacks cyberstalking the victims of tragedy in the hope that they don’t become monks. 

Of course, we journalists are famed for never drinking, taking drugs or having sex. On no, not us, guv. Add to us our well-known love of veracity and we are exactly the kind of people who should sit in judgment on everyone else.

And the Express, which is owned by a pornographer, hardly has the moral high ground on matters of the flesh.

But what of the hackette who wrote this abysmal piece. Well, Paula Murray is getting the Julie Moult treatment. But before we burn the witch we should remember that reporters are not solely responsible for what appears under their byline. A newsdesk, sub editors and an editor all OKed this vile smear.

Did any of them put their paw in the air to say what the Express now tacitly admits: that this was morally reprehensible?

There is room for individual conscience. Many, many years ago, when I was shifting at a London Sunday tab far viler than the Express, I deliberately messed up a particularly nasty nasty  because I thought it was wrong. 

It didn’t feel good to be unprofessional but I bet it felt better than Ms Murray feels now.

The Scotsman is dying. So is The Herald. Here are some notes towards a plan to save them – and all newspapers. I’d like to see a consortium to put this into practice and save Scotland’s native, quality, national press for the nation. This isn’t born out of delusion but rather a few discussions I’ve had with like-minded senior journalists who believe that the money can be raised and that this is last chance to save these two titles.

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.

I have made a return to newspapers of sorts. My agency, w00tonomy, has formed an alliance with Palmer Watson, one of the world’s leading newspaper design agencies.

Our expertise in online content will help them move into the field of newspaper websites while their knowledge of how design can maximise the appeal of words and pictures adds to our offering to our clients.

More on the problems of a small newspaper getting its money from the print edtion. Summary: If the top guys don't all want to see the website work, it's not gonna happen. Trying to get a staff that is used to the print edition and doesn't really understand online to use the internet is difficult. – Joey Baker

“It makes you wonder whether Jarvis has actually done any, you know, reporting,” Rosenbaum asks, lamenting his “contempt for the beautiful losers who actually made journalism an honorable profession.”

I’m still shaking my head over the American Press Institute’s announcement of a closed-door, invitation-only emergency meeting of only CEO-level newspaper executives to, in the words of E&P “ponder ways to revive the newspaper business.”
This is the last thing the newspaper industry needs. First, these are the very same proprietors of the newspaper industry’s decline. [...]