Sour Alba

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.

Just spent ages trying to get a panel of my picks from Amazon to appear on the blog. No matter what I did, nothing would appear. Wracked my brains for ages and then remembered: I browse with an ad blocker.

Duh!

So if you don’t browse with an ad blocker and are interested in some journo reading, here y’are:

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:

Ah, what a tangled web we we weave when we practise to write silly season stories about things we know little about.

A key danger of being a journalist is writing about a topic when sections of your audience know far more about it than you. This danger is multiplied when you’re flamming up a total non-story.

Sun and Mail hackette Julie Moult knows all about this after scribbling up some desperate nonsense about a photoshopped image of a politician. (Incidentally, the paper used the image without permission despite repeated request by the creator to stop lifting his work). She made several basic errors in the piece - such as describing what had happened as Googlebombing. (My favourite is the fact-box that says the practice of Googlebombing began in the “early 1990s” - a good trick as the Google.com domain was not registered until 1997.)

Treehouse Media Project has unveiled a manifesto for embittered journos everywhere. (Thanks to Irish-Swedish internet guru Mark Comerford for flagging this up.) Let me give you a flavour with this superbly passionate line:

Laid off? Bought out? Pissed off? Or just overworked because you’re one of the “lucky” ones still working for the walking corpse that is the daily newspaper? Join us, the diaspora, as we work to recapture the joy and passion of our noble profession.

The project has a noble aim: equipping journalists with the entrepreneurial skills to survive in a Web 2.0 world. It’s right: we should go it alone. But it strikes a bum note for me by starting off its homepage with “F*** Google. F*** Craig’s List.”

Even if this is just a come-hither to embittered hacks, it’s a mistake. Google, Craig’s List and other changes to online advertising give us the tools to be free.

Message to journalists everywhere: The internet is not the enemy, your employer’s business model is.

The internet will last. Big newspaper companies that screw profits out of cowed staff and unsophisticated advertisers are doomed.

Good.

F*** ‘em. Not Google. Not Craig’s List. F*** big media. They deserve to die. They have betrayed our sacred calling. And everyone who’s really a journalist in their hearts, guts and gonads will water their graves in the only way we know how - on the way home from the pub.

I’m inspired by Treehouse’s manifesto. And its prompted me to begin my own. But it’s not a manifesto. It’s a business plan. And while its mired in the net up to its oxters it still has that sickly sweet smell of printer’s ink.

Oh yes, print.

Print’s not dead. It’s just going through a painful adolescence.

Like all true hacks, that ink’s in my blood. Before I moved to the web in 2000, I’d experienced the joy-cum-terror of the “hold the front page” call. Until I became a husband and father, the proudest moment of my life was my first byline (The Scotsman, 1988). I’ll never forget my first splash (The Sunday Mail, 1994) or my first interview (Joe Strummer for The List, 1988.) On my wall I have three copper printer’s plates of The Scotsman from 1972 and 1999 - as well as a framed picture of the first edition of that paper not to carry ads on the front page (1956). And I know that for the consumption of some information print is the best answer.

But it’s only part of the whole picture - and the whole business plan. As I have said many times before, I believe that the net has brought us to the verge of a golden age of journalism. In fact, there has never been a better time to be a journalist. It’s just that there’s never been a worse time to work for a newspaper.

So don’t work for a newspaper. Work for a news organisation which understands the 21st century and isn’t relying on a business model that started looking dated after the invention of radio.

As for Scotland, it has one world-class newsroom in it. One which would stick the heid on the Times, Guardian, BBC and tediously navel-gazing US papers. Sadly, this talented newsroom is spread across dying titles, desperate news agencies and PR-land.

But it doesn’t need to be that way.

Let me paint you a picture of a world of direct communication with the reader. A world that rewarded the best in journalism with the greatest readership. A world of untainted revenue, without advertising department twats in ties with overlarge knots. Imagine a life without 30% profit margins taken out of your pocket. Dream of a life free from megalomaniac proprietors and muppet editors who exist only to trim costs and wouldn’t recognise a story if it kicked them in the old Niagaras with steel-toed boots embroidered with the words: “I AM A STORY, YOU STUPID, PAPERCLIP-COUNTING CHOOB.”

I have seen the promised land. I may not get there with you … but only because I’m going there on a motorbike.

Anyone coming for the ride?

MORE FOLLOWS

I believe this is the first anyway… It’s about my experiences being embedded in the civil service for a while.

 

 Sour Alba podcast 1: Historic first and the civil service [2:23m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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.

Over at the site of my new business, we’ve been having fun with the seven deadly sins. Nothing sordid, mind, all very tasteful. We’ve been listing the various downfalls we’ve seen befall sites and matching them up against the classical vices. (Of course, being a business, we then offer ourselves as the solution.) It’s part of our radical strategy of making clients’ content interesting.

Thanks to Bruce Combe from The List for pointing out this great headline in Woman & Home (no, I don’t know what he was looking for either). “Five years off your face”? I didn’t know that Bez wrote for that market. What next? “Shaun Ryder opens his heart to the People’s Friend”?