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.
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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On the press Small is inevitable
guardian.co.uk, UK - 6 hours ago Not in journalism. The loss of journalists may damage quality, turning away readers in the long term, but there is no simple way of proving the point. … |
Click to continue reading “guardian.co.uk: On the press Small is inevitable”
 Jossip |
The Future of Journalism Is In the Hands of Idiots
Gawker, NY - 8 hours ago Now he’s in an immature fight with Ron Rosenbaum, who is much smarter than he is, if also old and blinkered, about THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM. … Jeff Jarvis Is Kind of Jerky About Journalism New York Magazine New Media Versus Print Journalism: Finally, a Deathmatch! Jossip Jeff Jarvis Responds: Yes, Journalists ARE Responsible For Death … Silicon Alley Insider all 4 news articles |
I like to see former colleagues thrive, especially the decent ones. So it is with great pleasure that I note that Swimmer One have released a video to go with their new single. The group comprise Andrew Eaton – arts high heid yin at the dear old Hootsmon – and Hamish Brown (pictured left) – for a long time a fellow galley slave at the once good ship scotsman.com. They’re both damn good blokes and far too talented to be doing what they’re currently doing so I hope their very slick videos propels them and their soulful pop to musical world domination. Here’s the video and after you’ve watched why not buy their album Regional Variations? Just £7.99 on iTunes.
As I return from my Christmas and Hogmanay and first-week-in-January break, I find that Neil McIntosh, he of Guardian Unlimited and completetosh.com, has tagged me in the “my week in media” meme.
What I’ve read
The Grauniad, The Herald (my wife bought it), The New Statesman, Private Eye (late on returning from hols), National Geographic. I find buying the dear old Hootsmon too painful these days… (Do books count? I’ve just finished Peter Green’s Alexander of Macedon and Primo Levi’s If Not Now When. Both excellent though I have to confess to being drawn to the former because the author shares his name with one of Edinburgh’s best wine shops.)
What I’ve watched
Half of Blackburn vs Arsenal. (Realised I didn’t care about the result). The first few minutes of Where The Buffalo Roam. It’s a Bill Murray film about my hero Hunter S Thompson. It’s pitifully shite – don’t bother. The Thick Of It on DVD – brilliant. Aside from that, the news and whatever’s on Channel 4 at 9pm after the kids are in bed.
What I’ve listened to
BBC5 Live’s Fighting Talk, BBC4′s In Our Time and From Our Own Correspondent, Dan Savage’s terribly humane and sensible advice column Savage Love – all on podcast. I’m still trying to get into the Guardian’s football podcast but as (QPR aside) I have no interest in English footie, this is proving elusive.
What I’ve surfed
Anything and everything on Hibs, especially Hibeesbounce.com, which has tragically been down of late. For work (I’m an content consultant, which means I advise on content rather than am content), I have RSS feeds of favoured sources on key topics so I dip in and out of them. The usual new media suspects are there but Vin Crosbie and Neil McIntosh are especially worth a read on journalism. I always check Penny Arcade – masters in making money out of content. B3ta.com’s Question of the Week is a must-read as well, primarily cos it’s funny. Aside from that Facebook, when I feel I’ve not been invited to become a vampire enough.
I tag: Iain S Bruce, Alistair Brown, Andrew Heavens and Stephen Walker. Raff and Scott Douglas have been tagged already while Bruce Combe, Andy Carmichael and Craig Howie don’t have blogs…
This festive yuletide season, I kept a pledge that I made to myself a long time ago, when I used to work in newspapers.
I did not buy a paper on Christmas Day. I did not buy a paper on Boxing Day. I did not buy a paper on Ne’er Day. I did not buy a paper on 2 January.
I did not buy a paper on these days because I remember how bloody miserable it is to work in a newsroom over the festive season. I clearly remember the lonely misery of having to work Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Hogmanay when every normal person is having fun and relaxing. The misery was made pointless by the knowledge that sales on the festive days are pitifully small.
And I remember harbouring a seething hatred for those selfish morons who created the demand by deciding that what they really, really wanted on Boxing Day morning was to buy a very, very thing newspaper filled with wire copy and half-assed tales scrimped and saved by the newsdesk since October.
Ho ho ho.
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.
As one who believes in high-quality niche content, I’ve long been a fan of of the video game comic/commentary/community Penny Arcade. (In fact, I keep trying to slip John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory into presentations to clients curious about user interaction.)
I was therefore heartened and impressed by this post from the aforementioned Gabe about their attitude to advertising on the Penny Arcade (apologies for the lengthy quote, it’s worth it):
Other game site out there takes ads for whatever game they can get. It doesn’t matter if it’s a pile of crap, if the publisher pays for the spot IGN or Gamespot or whoever will run the ad. That’s fine but that’s not how we do it and the news posts you just read are part of the reason why..
No matter how early the build we tell the publishers that unless we can see it played in front of us or play it ourselves we won’t run ads for it. Obviously a lot can still go wrong during development but we make the best decisions we can. We do not think of the ads you see on our page as ads. They are recommendations and we try extremely hard to insure that anything we put over there is worth your time.
When Prince of Persia 2 came out and we saw that it was crap we said as much on the site. Ads for the game appeared right next to those news posts slamming it. Needless to say Ubi wasn’t very happy and Robert got some angry phone calls but our loyalty is to our readers not the people paying the bills.
We explained to Ubi that the reason our ads perform better than any other site out there is because our readers trust us and that means we have to admit when something we advertise doesn’t turn out as good as we hoped.
How great is that? How sensible is that? They regard ads as part of the content of their site and they vet products before they carry ads for them. If they then carry negative reviews, the games companies just have to suck it up. And why do these powerful organisations suck it up? They suck it up because ads on Penny Arcade out-perform ads on other sites. And why does that happen? Because Penny Arcade’s users trust what they see on the site. And they trust the ads precisely because the products are vetted and honestly reviewed.
Penny Arcade’s been around a long time and is a huge success. They really know what they’re doing. In that one post, Gabe and Tycho demonstrate far more commercial nous than many advertising people I’ve encountered.
Imagine similar conversations at a newspaper: “You want a full-colour wraparound advertising your ‘crack cocaine for kids’ casino open day? You want it to look like it’s the real front page of our paper? You want to spend £200? No way, we’re a respectable family publication. Oh, you said £2,000. Hey, sure, no problem. We’ll throw in the editor’s mum posing nude with a donkey as well.”
Let’s focus on Gabe’s key phrase: “Our loyalty is to our readers not the people paying the bills.” Maybe if newspapers had the spine to adopt that attitude their sales wouldn’t be going down the toilet.
One of my concerns about the debate on the future of journalism is that the loudest voices come from one of three camps: Americans; employees of London mainstream media; and “pure” bloggers.
Now I have the highest possible respect for American journalists, despite their unfortunate habit of ending every paragraph with the words “police sources said Thursday in a telephone interview on condition of anonymity”. But their approach to journalism is very different from their British counterparts and their markets are very different to ours (even if geographically there is crossover). This latter point is especially relevant in the concept of “local”, of which more another day.
London media heavyweights, while terribly clever, can slip into the trap of thinking the world ends at the M25. Their thinking can also be flavoured by budgets that would make NASA blush. Their solutions and innovations tend more towards the: “Let’s build a podcast studio” end of things rather than: “What’s the cheapest mic I can buy?”
Finally, bloggers are often unconcerned with (or even gleeful at) the fate of journalists working for flailing old MSM. (And who can blame them for that?) But that does mean that the practicalities of the ordinary journalist’s life and fears get overlooked.
Thus it is good to see a much-needed perspective being brought to media blogging by an “0ld sk00l” (as I believe the young people term it) journo. Stephen Rafferty is a hack’s hack in the finest traditions of Scottish tabloid journalism.
We need voices such as his as we try to work out what’s going to happen to journalism and journalists.
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My tweets- calgacus: Useful Scots word: peerie http://t.co/payqnk3q #history #scotland
- calgacus: Good coach, poor selector – Robinson lives up to that harsh tag again http://t.co/NpfojEnK #rugby #scotland
- calgacus: Up for grabs: six possible recipients of Goodwin’s cast-off knighthood http://t.co/qhTCFfGt #ukpolitics #rbs
