Sour Alba

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.

Private Eye’s Street of Shame column used to be illustrated with a Willie Rushton cartoon of a classic Fleet Street dissolute journalist slumped in front of a computer with a bottle. (Please excuse the gratuitous use at this point of a picture of Andrew Neil - he is actually irrelevant to this post - but one simply cannot mention the Eye without using that image.)

On the hack’s screen appeared the words: “New technology baffles pissed old hack.”

That hack’s had a pretty grim time of late. The fat years of long boozy lunches, unquestioned expenses and winging it have long gone. Bustling, smoke-filled newsrooms bursting with energy and profanity have been replaced by wannabe call centres staffed with clean, ambitious journalism graduates.

Now the whole industry seems on the point of collapse: circulations are tumbling nearly as fast as ad revenues. There’s no joy left in the craft. It seems to have become some kind of profession rather than the Epicureanist’s vocation it seemed to be back in the Good Old Days (™: any pissed old hack). But fear not, here’s the good news.

1) There will always be print: There are some kinds of content that are easier to read in the printed form. Ever tried to read anything over 1,000 words online? It’s like having your retina stir fried. Paper remains cheaper and more portable than any electronic device. Finally, print layouts are an effective way of presenting information in an easy-to-understand way. (None of this means, though, that the printing will be done by enormous presses with the product shipped round the country by trucks.)

2) There has never been greater demand for stories: More people than ever are consuming interesting stories. However, a vast number are not doing it in the ways they used to. Herein lies the revolution.

3) There will always be a need for journalistic skills: Someone has to write, film and picture the above stories. While user-generated content and citizen journalism offer fascinating opportunities, the ability to identify and filter information and then present it in an interesting, grammatical and ordered form needs a set of skills that are restricted to a tiny proportion of the general population - and far too few journalists.

4) There will always be a living to be made from journalism: OK, this is a bit of a leap of faith but trust me on this. The corollary of all the above is that there will be a commercial need for journalists - if they follow what the information market is doing.

The bad news: While there has never been a better time to be a journalist, there has never been a worse time to work for a newspaper. The future will be very kind to those who get it right and very harsh to those who don’t. If, as a journalist, your work is unique, interesting and relevant to your reader, congratulations, you will survive. If you understand that your audience is everything to you, that they are central to your work and that they provide input whose value cannot be calculated then you will thrive.

If, however, you’re waiting for your parent company’s commercial people to sort it all out while you keep on keeping on filling space like you always have done, then you’re extinct already. Remember the good times…