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.

From the blog of my company, w00tonomy:

We are delighted to announce that, in conjunction with our consortium partners The Union and Conscia, that w00tonomy has been selected for the Scottish Government’s digital marketing services framework.

This is a major achievement for a young agency and we are delighted. Along with our consortium partners, we look forward to providing the Scottish Government and other bodies using the roster with our services:

Turbocharge content to optimise appeal to online customers.

Creating messages that interest customers rather than messages they ignore.

We make online spend work harder. We deliver higher returns on online investment through the use of targeted, quality content to build a lasting relationship with your target audience.

If you’d like to know more, please contact us.

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!

I am very proud to be a journalist and, coincidentally, have long admired the late great Bill Hicks. I especially enjoyed his assessment of those trod “the other side” of the media line:

By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself. Thank you, thank you. Just a little thought. I’m just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day they’ll take root. I don’t know. You try. You do what you can. Kill yourselves. Seriously though, if you are, do. No really, there’s no rationalisation for what you do, and you are Satan’s little helpers, OK? Kill yourselves, seriously. You’re the ruiner of all things good. Seriously, no, this is not a joke. “There’s gonna be a joke coming…” There’s no fucking joke coming, you are Satan’s spawn, filling the world with bile and garbage, you are fucked and you are fucking us, kill yourselves, it’s the only way to save your fucking soul. Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself now. Now, back to the show.

So part of me is bewildered to find that I have set up a “content marketing” agency called w00tonomy. Yup, I now work in marketing, though I still consider myself a journalist. A journalist who is hibernating until the current great winnowing is past and the good times come back.

In the meantime, sorry Bill.

I was checking out the del.icio.us bookmarks of an Edinburgh design agency called Whitespace. There was a link to a most drollsome site which gives vent to designers’ frustrations with clients in general by offering Make My Logo Bigger Cream – complete with a natty video of the miracle product. The site is well done and very amusing but the thing that’s exercising my imagination is this: when Whitespace linked to this were they aware of the following imagery in the video?