Sour Alba

I await with interest the launch of Herald Scotland.

I have not held back from criticising Johnston Press’s handling of my baby scotsman.com but I see signs that what the Herald are about to do will make JP’s decisions look like the greatest internet wisdom since Tim Berners-Lee saw a spider making a trap for flies. (Actually that might have been Robert the Bruce but you know what I mean.)

My pessimism is based on four warning signs:

1) A new URL: According to the excellent AllMediaScotland, the Herald plans to amalgamate its existing sites to create one seven-day operation. The key risk here is what happens to the current sites and, crucially, all the inbound links and search engine reputation they have built up over the years. If the old sites are junked then all those inbound links (vital for search engine reputation) will be lost.  Also, their very valuable search engine page ranks will be lost. Now there are ways and means of sending traffic to  new address. But even a 301 redirect can take months to take effect completely (thus losing valuable traffic and revenue). Also, given that the Herald and Sunday Herald’s web addresses have different structures a redirect might struggle.

But if they run the old and new sites in parallel then they face a massive search engine penalty for having duplicate content.

And if they launch the new URL without a ton of content, it will lose the huge benefit of the Heralds’ exisitng content.

In short, once you ‘ve got a URL stick with it. Sod rebranding.

2) Flash: The holding page is a search-engine-invisible Flash animation. An emphasis on “looking pretty” over “working properly” is no a good sign for whatever’s coming next.

3) Tag line: The marketing slogan for the new site appears to be: “Make it home”. That smacks of “make this your hompage”, which has been made hopelessly outdated by bookmarking, decent search engines and social networks.

4) The suggestion of charging. No, no, no, no. No matter what Rupert Murdoch says, the arguments for charging for content are all to do with what newspapers would like and not what readers will do. If you put your content behind a payment barrier, people will not pay you. They will go to a free site that offers content similar to yours. This is not an argument about quality – though the Herald’s has taken a big hit by cutting so many staff – but about how the customer behaves.

Now, all these indications might be off the mark but, for me, they point to worrying times ahead for Scotland’s online media.

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.

Did an interview with Chris Dempsey of Registers of Scotland for my agency. Chris worked for the Scottish Government, Executive and Office for many, many years and has some interesting points about the state of marketing north of the Border.

Labour’s Lindsay Roy has won the Glenrothers by-election, beating the SNP by more than 6,700. The Nats had been widely expected to win the seat despite the fact that it was once safe Labour territory and is next door to Gordon Brown’s constituency.

The result is important for two reasons:

• It makes it more likely that Gordon Brown will lead Labour into the next UK General Election. While a challenge has been unlikely since the arrival of the credit crunch, a defeat in his kailyard would have weakened him within the party.
• It makes an independent Scotland less likely – as the result marks a serious brake on the momentum of the Scottish National Party. 

This afternoon, I looked out of the window and caught a glimpse through the haar of the strange glowing thing in the sky that non-Scots call “the sun”.

As I reached for my summer fleece, my eye was caught by this post from Andrew Heavens, a Scottish journalist working in Sudan. (Well, he was born and brought up in England and works in Africa but he went to uni in Edinburgh and used to work here so I claim him as Scottish.) I won’t spoil it all for you but it starts:

“You know you lived in Khartoum when…you think that 35 to 39C is a good outside temperature.”

Lucky, lucky swine.( Though his post does end with a cheery: “But anyway, back to the looming war.”)

Well, I like that idea a lot and am going to steal it. But I want to keep away from the bullshit weedgie media cliches about Hibs casuals, “sex of coal” and “mair fun at a Glescae stabbing than an Edinburgh wedding”.

You know you live in Edinburgh when:

• It’s called Embra.
• The “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” is summer, without the fruitfulness bit.
• A road is a long trench with cars sitting beside it.
• Every August you pay an involuntary levy of an extra 10% on the price of drinks and taxis.
• You know someone who knows someone who’s the inspiration of a character in Trainspotting.
• You know someone who was in Oi Polloi, The Exploited or The Proclaimers. Or you’ve been in the pub with Dick Gaughn or Andy Chung.
• The big hotel at the east end of Princes Street is called “The North British”. End. Of. Story.
• Your mum/dad/uncle/aunt’s friend insists they were on Sean Connery’s milkround OR painted him when he was a life model. They were also at Tynecastle for the 0-7 game. (It must have had a capacity of 150,000 back then.)
• Your doctor, lawyer, estate agent and mortgage adviser all went to the same school.
• A flute is something your cousin plays in her school orchestra.
• Scotland is divided into five regions: us, Fife, Borders, Highlands and apocalyptic industrial wasteland that should really be part of Northern Ireland.
• There is one condiment for fish suppers. And one only.

Did I miss anything?

My second podcast. Longer than the first, now with added gratuitous and unsubstantiated claims of bestiality. Maybe.

 

 Sour Alba podcast 2: Scottish politics and donkey sex [5:13m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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.

Former Scotsman editor John McGurk has produced a fascintating investigation for the BBC on the future of the indigenous Scottish quality press. His conclusion is that it’s fucked.

When I was editor of scotsman.com (seven years, ten-fold increase in readerts, ahtankyew) John and I had our differences insofar as he would joyfully have strangled the online edition in its cot. But he has hit the nail on the head with this piece.

As well as exposing the guilty secret of plummeting sales at the Horrid and Hootsmon, John reveals that public sector advertising worth £47m will no longer be placed in the Scottish nationals. To put that the effects of that in layman’s terms: game over, man, game over.

Some thoughts occurred to me:

• If the Scottish public sector (and the politicians who run it) want native Scottish journalism they should continue to advertise with the Scottish nationals.
• They are under absolutely no obligation to do so, any more than readers are obliged to buy the papers.
• This is a lesson that the Scotsman and Herald have not learned. They are owned by companies (Gannet and Johnston Press) that insist on obscenely large profit margins and sacrifice quality to achieve them. Both papers are produced on a shoestring. It shows. The quality of journalism in both papers has fallen drastically. That’s why people don’t buy them. Why should they?
• At no point did John mention the Metro. On the 26 bus to the centre of Edinburgh people used to read the Scotsman but they now read the Metro – a low quality tabloid packed with wire copy. As that’s what Scotsman has become why should people bother paying money for it? (Oh and Johnston Press does not understand The Scotsman and their much-lauded digital strategy is deeply flawed – no matter how much Tim Bowdler clings to it when the share price falls. Again.)
• While Andrew Neil and John spoke movingly about the decline of Scottish papers they were strangely reticent about their own contribution. Brillo in particular has been loud in his condemnation of JP’s record at the Scotsman (correctly, by the way). However, the wirily coiffed one is not so hot on his own record. A listener phoning in to BBC Scotland’s Morning Extra to discuss John’s report had this to say: “These two were handed a quality paper and handed back the Beano at the end of their tenure.” McGurk had no answer to that but a joke about how healthy the Beano’s sales were. For years, I tried in vain at the Scotsman to discover the exact decline in sales when Neil was in charge but no-one could ever tell me. I do know that his stewardship was a wasted opportunity. He had the backing and the ambition to take the paper forward but his bloody true believer Thatcherite ideology got in the way and he alienated the readers and lost many, many fine journalists – mostly to Business AM.
• The Herald and Scotsman will merge soon. Both titles will survive as west and east coast editions of one product. I don’t think either Gannet or JP have the vision (or cash) to do that. As John said in his piece, PLCs are a bad bet for newspapers. I believe the future lies with trusts and family firms. My money’s on DC Thomson or the Guardian to buy and merge them. I have no reason for thinking this other than a feeling in my water.

Finally, readers still care. One lady on the phone-in lamented the demise of the Edinburgh Evening Dispatch. But despite feedback from readers, Charles McGhee of the Herald did not seem to take on board any of their criticisms. And that’s part of the problem too.

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.