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.
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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.
Click to continue reading “Johnston Press halves scotsman.com’s traffic: well played”
This piece originally appeared in w00tonomy’s Content Marketing Watch column.
Hotfoot from ScotWeb2 – a get-together of those with an interest in the public sector and the internet. Organised by Alex Stobart, a recovering civil servant,
The highlights, apart from my workshop on making the most of content, were talks by James Munro of PatientOpinon and Simon Dickson of Puffbox.
Click to continue reading “ScotWeb2 on the net and the public sector”
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.
This afternoon, I looked out of the window and caught a glimpse through the haar of the strange glowing thing in the sky that non-Scots call “the sun”.
As I reached for my summer fleece, my eye was caught by this post from Andrew Heavens, a Scottish journalist working in Sudan. (Well, he was born and brought up in England and works in Africa but he went to uni in Edinburgh and used to work here so I claim him as Scottish.) I won’t spoil it all for you but it starts:
“You know you lived in Khartoum when…you think that 35 to 39C is a good outside temperature.”
Lucky, lucky swine.( Though his post does end with a cheery: “But anyway, back to the looming war.”)
Well, I like that idea a lot and am going to steal it. But I want to keep away from the bullshit weedgie media cliches about Hibs casuals, “sex of coal” and “mair fun at a Glescae stabbing than an Edinburgh wedding”.
You know you live in Edinburgh when:
- It’s called Embra.
- The “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” is summer, without the fruitfulness bit.
- A road is a long trench with cars sitting beside it.
- Every August you pay an involuntary levy of an extra 10% on the price of drinks and taxis.
- You know someone who knows someone who’s the inspiration of a character in Trainspotting.
- You know someone who was in Oi Polloi, The Exploited or The Proclaimers. Or you’ve been in the pub with Dick Gaughn or Andy Chung.
- The big hotel at the east end of Princes Street is called “The North British”. End. Of. Story.
- Your mum/dad/uncle/aunt’s friend insists they were on Sean Connery’s milkround OR painted him when he was a life model. They were also at Tynecastle for the 0-7 game. (It must have had a capacity of 150,000 back then.)
- Your doctor, lawyer, estate agent and mortgage adviser all went to the same school.
- A flute is something your cousin plays in her school orchestra.
- Scotland is divided into five regions: us, Fife, Borders, Highlands and apocalyptic industrial wasteland that should really be part of Northern Ireland.
- There is one condiment for fish suppers. And one only.
Did I miss anything?
Another one bites the dust. Scottish Lib Dem leader, Nicol Stephen, has just quit. Says he wants “more time with my family”. Hmmmm, what does that really mean?
My money’s on Tavish Scott to succeed him.
Wenday Alexander has resigned as leader of Scottish Labour. This is the right decision not because of any donation nonsense but because she’s an uncharismatic policy wonk.Very bright and all that but she doesn’t have ingredient X.
Labour now need to find a leader with brains *and* people skills, someone who can match Salmond and Sturgeon on the intellectual and rhetorical level.
Sadly for Labour, there’s no-one matching that description on their benches…
Former Scotsman editor John McGurk has produced a fascintating investigation for the BBC on the future of the indigenous Scottish quality press. His conclusion is that it’s fucked.
When I was editor of scotsman.com (seven years, ten-fold increase in readerts, ahtankyew) John and I had our differences insofar as he would joyfully have strangled the online edition in its cot. But he has hit the nail on the head with this piece.
As well as exposing the guilty secret of plummeting sales at the Horrid and Hootsmon, John reveals that public sector advertising worth £47m will no longer be placed in the Scottish nationals. To put that the effects of that in layman’s terms: game over, man, game over.
Some thoughts occurred to me:
- If the Scottish public sector (and the politicians who run it) want native Scottish journalism they should continue to advertise with the Scottish nationals.
- They are under absolutely no obligation to do so, any more than readers are obliged to buy the papers.
- This is a lesson that the Scotsman and Herald have not learned. They are owned by companies (Gannet and Johnston Press) that insist on obscenely large profit margins and sacrifice quality to achieve them. Both papers are produced on a shoestring. It shows. The quality of journalism in both papers has fallen drastically. That’s why people don’t buy them. Why should they?
- At no point did John mention the Metro. On the 26 bus to the centre of Edinburgh people used to read the Scotsman but they now read the Metro – a low quality tabloid packed with wire copy. As that’s what Scotsman has become why should people bother paying money for it? (Oh and Johnston Press does not understand The Scotsman and their much-lauded digital strategy is deeply flawed – no matter how much Tim Bowdler clings to it when the share price falls. Again.)
- While Andrew Neil and John spoke movingly about the decline of Scottish papers they were strangely reticent about their own contribution. Brillo in particular has been loud in his condemnation of JP’s record at the Scotsman (correctly, by the way). However, the wirily coiffed one is not so hot on his own record. A listener phoning in to BBC Scotland’s Morning Extra to discuss John’s report had this to say: “These two were handed a quality paper and handed back the Beano at the end of their tenure.” McGurk had no answer to that but a joke about how healthy the Beano’s sales were. For years, I tried in vain at the Scotsman to discover the exact decline in sales when Neil was in charge but no-one could ever tell me. I do know that his stewardship was a wasted opportunity. He had the backing and the ambition to take the paper forward but his bloody true believer Thatcherite ideology got in the way and he alienated the readers and lost many, many fine journalists – mostly to Business AM.
- The Herald and Scotsman will merge soon. Both titles will survive as west and east coast editions of one product. I don’t think either Gannet or JP have the vision (or cash) to do that. As John said in his piece, PLCs are a bad bet for newspapers. I believe the future lies with trusts and family firms. My money’s on DC Thomson or the Guardian to buy and merge them. I have no reason for thinking this other than a feeling in my water.
Finally, readers still care. One lady on the phone-in lamented the demise of the Edinburgh Evening Dispatch. But despite feedback from readers, Charles McGhee of the Herald did not seem to take on board any of their criticisms. And that’s part of the problem too.
It’s not always easy being a hack. You throw your creativity out into an uncaring world and think nobody’s watching.
But they are, especially when you screw up, as BBC Scotland’s Judith Tonner demonstrates.
What’s even more surprising is the extent to which even the smallest (albeit very flashy) gesture gets analysed over and over again, as with David Robertson’s pen trick.
Posted on w00tonomy:
Stewart Kirkpatrick, our Content Marketing Director, has induced a bout of vomiting at w00tonomy with this self-serving communique:
“I have been elected to the New Media Industry Council of the National Union of Journalists (in a jobshare with Euan Williamson of Imagineering). Like nearly every large body, the NUJ has struggled with what the web means for today and tomorrow. I am delighted to have this opportunity to help guide its thinking.”
Stewart will also be speaking at the Sunday Herald’s Shaping Scotland’s Digital Future event – at 9am on 24 April at The Teacher Building, St Enoch Square, Glasgow – where he will be tarred and feathered by the rest of w00tonomy if he comes out with anything similar in tone to the above statement.
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- calgacus: Good coach, poor selector – Robinson lives up to that harsh tag again http://t.co/NpfojEnK #rugby #scotland
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