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

Foulkes gets it soooooooooo wrong

Stewart — Tue, 12 May 2009 13:38:09 +0000

Lord Foulkes has demonstrated how out of touch politicians are with public feeling by attacking BBC journalists for criticising MPs’ expenses. Sure, there are newsreaders who get paid more than most of us think they should. But they are not clearly on the fiddle, unlike some of George’s former colleagues in the Lower House.

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?

Scottish Labour: yet-to-be-elected leader must go

stewart @ w00tonomy — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 01:55:10 +0000

The stunning events in Glasgow East show that Scottish Labour needs to hurry up and choose its new leader so the new incumbent can be hounded out in the wake of the party’s shaming defeat.

Gordon Brown out on the wiley, windy moors?

stewart @ w00tonomy — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 19:22:28 +0000

Apparently Gordon Brown thinks he’s Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights. The similarities are obvious : Byronic anti-hero driven wild by untamed passion and uncharismatic, prudence-obsessed bureaucat with a penchant for dropping his jaw open like a broken glove box.

Of course, he doesn’t say he is really like Heathcliff. No, even when it comes to literary characters Brown dithers. “Maybe an older Heathcliff, a wiser Heathcliff.”

An older, wiser Heathcliff. Wiser? Has Brown actually read the book? It is precisely because he lacks wisdom that Heathcliff is Heathcliff. A wiser Heathcliff makes as much sense as a more metrosexual James Bond, a more trustworthy Iago or a more laconic Stephen Dedalus.

But maybe Brown is truly like Heathcliff in one way. Perhaps we have misjudged him. Perhaps he is enacting a dark vengeance , the culmination of years of savage plotting after being spurned. Sadly for Labour, it was the party itself that spurned him by keeping out of the top job for so long. Now, he is exacting his revenge, wrecking its chances utterly.

I don’t know who’s tapping at the window but, sadly for Britain, David Cameron is hammering on the door. Given that Picture Of Dorian Thatcher scenario, you can’t blame Brown for retreating into fiction.