Sour Alba

All hail the New Media Company Generator - a worthy successor to the almost prophetic Web Economy Bullshit Generator. (I know companies that really do “exploit viral markets” and “scale robust communities”.)

The wickedly observed company generator came up with ThirstyBadger, which on the while I like better than w00tonomy.

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 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.

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

Another one bites the dust. Scottish Lib Dem leader, Nicol Stephen, has just quit. Says he wants “more time with my family”. Hmmmm, what does that really mean?

My money’s on Tavish Scott to succeed him.

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

It’s not always easy being a hack. You throw your creativity out into an uncaring world and think nobody’s watching.

But they are, especially when you screw up, as BBC Scotland’s Judith Tonner demonstrates.

What’s even more surprising is the extent to which even the smallest (albeit very flashy) gesture gets analysed over and over again, as with David Robertson’s pen trick.

Posted on w00tonomy:

Stewart Kirkpatrick, our Content Marketing Director, has induced a bout of vomiting at w00tonomy with this self-serving communique:

“I have been elected to the New Media Industry Council of the National Union of Journalists (in a jobshare with Euan Williamson of Imagineering). Like nearly every large body, the NUJ has struggled with what the web means for today and tomorrow. I am delighted to have this opportunity to help guide its thinking.”

Stewart will also be speaking at the Sunday Herald’s Shaping Scotland’s Digital Future event - at 9am on 24 April at The Teacher Building, St Enoch Square, Glasgow - where he will be tarred and feathered by the rest of w00tonomy if he comes out with anything similar in tone to the above statement.

I just took the What Is Your Net Culture IQ quiz. Man, has my finger slipped off the web trivia pulse. Given that I used to pen the Lazy Guide To Net Culture I was disappointed with the result: 104. Higher than average but less than half of the top score.

Mind you my disappointment was as nothing compared to what I felt what the redesign of scotsman.com did to the display of my old columns in the link above…