Sour Alba

 I’ve just hotfooted (hotfeet?) from BBC Scotland’s Politics Show where I chewed the fact about the future of Scottish papers. If you’re reading this before 1 March you can watch it on iPlayer. (I’m at 80 minutes in.)

I was pleasantly surprised to find myself agreeing almost totally with John McGurk about the net and the importance of “distinctive content”. He and I crossed swords many times over just these issues when he was managing editor at Scotsman Publications and sales figures loomed large in his mind.

Those figures have been brought into sharp relief by the departure of Mike Gilson through the revolving door of The Scotsman’s editor’s office.

On a personal level, I like Mike but it’s hard to be positive about his record.

He was parachuted in from a local newspaper in southern England. He was Johnston Press’s man. Like others at JP he can be accused of not understanding The Scotsman, thinking it was the Edinburgh Morning News. The paper is demonstrably poor. And, of course, sales collapsed to the tune of 14,000 sales.

However, this is far from the full story. Mike had many strong points. He was an enthusiastic editor and an imaginative journalist. He was the ninth to sit in the editor’s chair since I joined the paper in 1995. He was by no means the worst or even the second worst to occupy that bloodstained perch.

Those sales figures cannot be laid solely at Mike’s door. To support this assertion I would point to Johnston Press’s impact scotsman.com, which I edited for seven years. Thanks to the team I worked with, we built it up to be one of Google News’s top sites worldwide, a multi-award winner, 4 million users a month, blah, blah, blah.

But then JP got rid of the team, ditched the lovingly crafted site and imposed their own one, better suited to the Craphampton Argus than our huge international audience. Unique users have halved. 

My defence of Mike is based largely on this. As JP’s short-sightedness did to the websites so it did to the resources that the editor of the paper had at his disposal.

And unsurprisingly when you cut costs, sales fall. Unfortunately, that process will continue under the new ubereditor, John McLellan. This is no reflection on John. He’s a very strong choice. A shrewd, instinctive news man, he has been at TSPL since shortly after the relief of Mafeking. He has a gut feel for the readers. And he has for a long time been the most web-friendly editor at Barclay Towers. Also in the editorial hierarchy he has Tom Little and Ian Stewart, two talented stalwarts who *gasp* have more than a passing acquaintance with the TSPL products.

If anyone can make the (much denied) seven-day model work in practical terms, it’s these guys. Former Marine Ian Stewart’s been shot at, getting subs to work an extra couple of shifts won’t be much of a trial.  But in quality terms the move is a disaster – as is the Record’s similar move. Even Citizen Kane couldn’t save that situation.

It doesn’t take a genius to work out that making the product weaker does not make it more attractive to the customer.

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:

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.