Sour Alba

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 just read Arthur MacMillan’s excellent autopsy of the corpse of Scottish newspapers in the British Journalism Review. It is a forensic examination of what’s gone wrong and why there is no hope. And it rightly fingers the muppets and Johnston Press and Gannet who have brought what we laughingly call Scotland’s quality papers to their knees.

However, the article falls into the trap of by implication exonerating Andrew Neil, who is as responsible for the demise of the Hootsmon as the overpromoted local newspaper crowd. While JP has had a massively detrimental effect on the paper and the website, Neil cannot escape blame. Here’s why:

As I may have mentioned, my former project has undergone a redesign. I’ve been monitoring user responses to this via the comments on scotsman.com stories. Judging by the remarks on this story, the new design is not getting an enthusiastic reception. Here’s a sample of comments (remember, people who regularly comment on a site’s stories tend to be its core readership):

• More people are concerned about the dreadful new layout of the posting page than are able to comment on the story. Scotsman, this is your worst idea yet.
• What a joke! Newsquest will be falling about.the old format was much better, this change in not good at all
• It’s a bit mince n’est pas?
• I will report this site as unsuitable.
• I happen to know that Johnston Press got rid of the team behind the old Scotsman website. Not without a fight.
• I think we shoudl e-mail the Scotsman. Their site used to be the best among UK papers for usability, comment and ease of reading - this is now very poor, and worse than the Herald.
• I think this is knackered already lol
• I’m gone. This is unusable.
• SCOTSMAN ARE YOU LISTENING? THIS IS TERRIBLE AND YOU WILL LOSE ALL YOUR POSTERS IF YOU DON’T GO BACK TO THE WAY IT WAS. PLEASE!
• Oh, this site is just the worst now.

For me the most damning comment was this: “With the Herald you can at least see what you have written and use bold and italics.” The Herald website, which for so long lagged behind as an object of derision and pity, is now favourably compared to the dear old Hootsmon.

UPDATE

Yet more negative feedback in this piece entitled “New look for Scotsman’s leading website“. Here’s a flavour of the 46 responses:

• This is appallingly bad, the old design was a little dated perhaps, but much better than this. I thought we left behind this ‘my first homepage’ aesthetic with Netscape Navigator and dial up modems. Why does Johnson Press seem so concerted to make The Scotsman into little more than a regional newspaper of little importance?
• Not only are there still glitches in this new setup, but it is, to say the least, appalling. It is badly organised and quite feeble in comparison to the original. Did the Editor’s kids design it themselves, ot was it a school project?
• I’ll post as usual … but I don’t like this set-up. Not a bit of it! It’s now a generic newspaper look. How uniquely Scottish is that? Bad move Hootsmon … Your advisers want shot!!!
• Sorry, but I don’t like it very much; it’s almost identical to that of the Montrose Review, Brechin Advertiser and all the little locals which are printed by Johnson Press…adequate but not sufficient for a broadsheet such as The Scotsman…
• This website is awful. I suppose the new dreadful look matches the new dreadful standards of journalism under Johnston Press.

Ouch.

UPDATE II

Mad propz to allmediascotland.com for spotting yet more disgruntlement in this Edinburgh Evening News story. Here are some further highlights:

• This took “several months of preparation and planning”? Looks more like an afternoon’s work by a couple of drunk toddlers.
• As a web designer and project manager with around 12 years experience working with some of the largest blue chip companies in the UK I would give this effort 2 out of 10 (well at least it loads!)
• All three Scotsman publications online have glittered in a galaxy dominated by website giants such as BBC News , Guardian Unlimited and the New York Times - to cite just three worthy examples.The cliche that now leaps to mind is: “If it aint broke,why fix it”?
• This “new look” is an embarrassing step backwards. The old Scotsman websites had a simple and effective style. Quite classy almost. This new version is something else. I wonder if the design remit went like this:
  “Let’s implement something that looks like tawdry p!sh, indistinguishable from all the dross that’s out there. We want to run the Scotsman into the ground”.
  
• This new dub dub dub is shocking. Sack the person responsible. I would love to have some Evening News journalist contact me. I’d give them a piece of my mind, lets face it they cannot spell, thay have no proper grasp of grammar and they display an appaling lack of sense. Morevover where are all my letters going as I type them. I wondered if there was something amiss with my set at this end. Perhaps it is the ‘improvements’ made by the Johnson Pres people. Bring it on schoolboys, we fought a war that you might print your drivel. Merry Christmas.

Merry Christmas indeed. God bless us one and all.

Farewell, old friend, farewell.

Scotsman.com, the site I edited from 2001 to 2007, is about to undergo a comprehensive redesign, in much the same way as a beloved pet undergoes a comprehensive redesign when taken to the vet for the very last time.

You can see what the future holds on the new scotsman.com beta site.

What I would like to do at this point is to carry out a forensic, line by line analysis of which is the better site and why. However, I am slightly biased towards the version created when I was Editor. And, in any case, too many people like to take all-too-predictable pops at The Hootsmon - a fine Scottish institution and a vital part of our national life - and I am not going to administer a metaphorical swift kick to its happy sacks by giving yet more ammunition to its detractors.

So I have come to praise Caesar, not to bury his successor up to the neck in keech. For the record, lest these things become forgotten after the redesign, scotsman.com 2001-2007 vintage achieved great things:

Traffic increased tenfold to four million unique users a month. The site became one of Google’s top 30 worldwide news sources. The site won the Newspaper Society’s best daily newspaper site award three times. In the Newspaper Awards, it was listed ahead of papers like the FT. Our original online content saw scotsman.com shortlisted for several national and international journalism awards. Mediaweek rated it as the sixth biggest news site in the UK. Hitwise said it was the eighth.

Those achievements are pretty amazing given the site was run by a small, regional publisher with sod-all resources and a sometimes far from affectionate attitude from some newspaper colleagues. (All of whom are now, I’m sure, true believers in online journalism - or unemployed.) Compare that record to the other Scottish titles and you see quite how remarkable the soon-to-be-former scotsman.com was.

The success did not come from the repurposed newspaper content we put online. It came from what the small dotcom team did to that content and the additional online-only material we created. And it came from the close cooperation between the different parts of scotsman.com - editorial, operational, development, design, even *gasp* those grubby commercial types.

What we built back in 2001 looked nice but that was secondary to how it worked. The old scotsman.com was a model of usability. It was built with an unrelenting focus on getting the reader to what they wanted as quickly as possibly. And it was built to be easily put online by one person.

The old scotsman.com was innovative - look at our early adoption of tags (themes or topics), RSS, video podcasts and user comment. And it was put together by a remarkably talented team, who by our results could be justifiably described as world class. Most of us have left Scotsman Publications. (Many ended up at The List - an Edinburgh listings mag with a dramatically improved online presence.) However, some remain at The Scotsman - bringing their professionalism and considerable talents to bear on implementing the redesign - always a major task.

Ah yes, the redesign, well, you can have your say on it thanks to this survey on scotsman.com.