Sour Alba

Journalists! Now is the time to start your own news site.

Confusing their need for income with a desire among customers to pay for content, the papers are about to hand over their audiences following the lead of the Dirty Digger.

They made you and you friends redundant, they froze your pay, they made you write umpteen stories a day during 12-hour shifts in increasingly empty newsrooms. And all the while they creamed off ludicrous profits. Now they want the online reader to foot the bill.

It’s an enormous mistake but it’s great news for the future of journalism.

Murdoch’s wrong because everything about the net is moving towards sharing and the free movement of content. Hiding content behing barriers simply ignores how most people access it.

Murdoch, Lionel Barber and the other pro-chargers assume that because they need a lot of money that people will pay to access news and comment online. But that’s not how life works. Something is only worth what people will pay for it.

Charging for news has alwyas been bonkers. How can you put a barrier round “Lord Jones is dead”? It is instantly, immediately copiable without contravening any known or possible copyright laws.

In essence, the problem is that of Spotify vs iTunes. Spotify lets you listen to  unlimited amounts of music from a vast playlist. It’s free but the catch is you don’t get to download or keep any of it. If you want to own it, you need to hop onto iTunes and buy a download.

The problem is that online news and comment is like most music on Spotify – you access it once and walk away. Unlike with music, though, there are very, very few news or comment items that you would pay to keep for ever.

However, news media companies do have access to a suite of products that people will pay to keep – and that are more suited than the web to the presentation of all that high-quality fabby content that the moguls have been boasting of: print.

You see, it’s not the online products that are broken: it’s the print ones. Just because large numbers of readers don’t like the one size fits all version doesn’t mean that that’s it for print. And it doesn’t mean they’re suddenly going to want to pay for material online.

So what’s the good news for journalism?

Well, when J Arthur Reader pops online to enquire after the health of Lord Jones, what will he do when he sees that all the “Lord Jones is dead” stories from the mainstream news organisations are behind payment barriers? Will he A) get out his chequebook or B) read the story for free somewhere else?

And what is to stop journalists from setting up their own nimble news enterprises to supply that free news? (Sure there’s the BBC but it can’t do attitude or opinion.) These specialist enterpises would have no legacy costs and which could make use of targeted print products to boost revenue. They could even co-operate with other non-competing enterprises to buy back-room services (ad sales, printing, IT).

When the big boys shoot themselves in the foot, it’s a great time to challenge them to a race.

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.

Hurrah for those very decent people at The List – Edinburgh and Glasgow’s listings magazine. Their website won “Best Online Presence” at the 2008 Scottish Magazine Awards.

So many hearty gratz to my many former scotsman.com colleagues who work there and to Robin Hodge, their all round good egg publisher.

Yay for the good guys!

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.

More on the problems of a small newspaper getting its money from the print edtion. Summary: If the top guys don't all want to see the website work, it's not gonna happen. Trying to get a staff that is used to the print edition and doesn't really understand online to use the internet is difficult. – Joey Baker

“It makes you wonder whether Jarvis has actually done any, you know, reporting,” Rosenbaum asks, lamenting his “contempt for the beautiful losers who actually made journalism an honorable profession.”

This piece originally appeared in w00tonomy’s Content Marketing Watch column.

Hotfoot from ScotWeb2 – a get-together of those with an interest in the public sector and the internet. Organised by Alex Stobart, a recovering civil servant,

The highlights, apart from my workshop on making the most of content, were talks by James Munro of PatientOpinon and Simon Dickson of Puffbox.

The whole media world is diminished by the row over Russell Brand, Jonathan Ross and Andrew Sachs. I don’t mean the whole “offensive or funny” stramash but the disgraceful absence of ”who is man with beard” jokes.

Come on, people. We have Manuel. We have a man with beard. This is basic stuff.

Further, the transcripts are useless as the “offensive” elements are starred out. We are told that Ross shouted to Sachs’s answerphone: “He ****** your granddaughter!” or, if the media outlet’s being daring: “f*****”. 

But if we’re going to get properly outraged we need to know what the overpaid choob actually said because that affects how serious the whole row is. Was it “shagged”? Because that’s no biggie. With the “f*****” version we know it was probably “fucked”? But maybe it was “fisted” or even “felched” both of which bring different layers of seriousness to the party.

God bless the Grauniad that at least dared tell its readers what they should be offended about. And I’d bless the Beeb for doing the same but I know they’ll hang a functionary out to dry and give the alleged stars the mildest of slaps on the wrist.