Sour Alba

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.

Depending on your point of view convergence means one of two things in journalism:

1) If you’re a journalist committed to using online to fulfil our sacred mission to explain, then it’s a chance to use all media platforms to tell a story, combining the expertise of writers, photographers and video journalists.

2) If you’re a media owner, it’s a chance to cut costs by making bags of journos redundant and loading extra workload onto the survivors so, as well as putting out tired, unimaginative papers (or programmes), they can pump out tired, unimaginative, low-quality video.

The problem with Route 2 is that Media Owner’s Online Property will then be filled with tired, unimaginative items that will die alone in the dark like all the other tired, unimaginative bits of content shoveled online by Media Owners’ Online Properties. And the readers will continue their long, slow (or long, fast) migration away from mainstream media.

But this is a good thing for the future of journalism.

Why? I’m beginning to notice that as many (but not all) news organisations undergo “convergence” (of the second kind, natch) the pioneers – the innovators who adopted online early – are being elbowed aside.

Why is this good? It means that the far-sighted journalists are being set free from the constraints of hide-bound employers – many set free with redundo cash in their wallets. The hope is that groups of them will come together and explore the models that will drive journalism forward in ways that are infinitely more fruitful than the “hey, when you’ve finished your shift, let’s do a vodcast” model.

I mentioned in my last post the need for many voices in the debate on the future of journalism. The latest contribution comes from Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert. As he’s made what I believe is referred to as “an shedload of filthy lucre” from selling content, Mr Adams ’s views are particularly interesting.

His opinion of newspapers? They’re a’ fecked. And it’s the mobile that will kill them. Adams does think there will be some newspapers and some professional journalists.

But not many.