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 [...]]]> 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 That smacks of “make this your hompage”, which has been made hopelessly outdated by bookmarking, decent search engines and social networks.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.

I was pleasantly surprised to find myself agreeing almost totally with John McGurk about the net [...]]]>  I’ve just hotfooted (hotfeet?) from BBC Scotland’s Politics Show where I chewed the fact about the future of Scottish papers. If you’re reading this before 1 March you can watch it on iPlayer. (I’m at 80 minutes in.)

I was pleasantly surprised to find myself agreeing almost totally with John McGurk about the net and the importance of “distinctive content”. He and I crossed swords many times over just these issues when he was managing editor at Scotsman Publications and sales figures loomed large in his mind.

Those figures have been brought into sharp relief by the departure of Mike Gilson through the revolving door of The Scotsman’s editor’s office.

On a personal level, I like Mike but it’s hard to be positive about his record.

He was parachuted in from a local newspaper in southern England. He was Johnston Press’s man. Like others at JP he can be accused of not understanding The Scotsman, thinking it was the Edinburgh Morning News. The paper is demonstrably poor. And, of course, sales collapsed to the tune of 14,000 sales.

However, this is far from the full story. Mike had many strong points. He was an enthusiastic editor and an imaginative journalist. He was the ninth to sit in the editor’s chair since I joined the paper in 1995. He was by no means the worst or even the second worst to occupy that bloodstained perch.

Those sales figures cannot be laid solely at Mike’s door. To support this assertion I would point to Johnston Press’s impact scotsman.com, which I edited for seven years. Thanks to the team I worked with, we built it up to be one of Google News’s top sites worldwide, a multi-award winner, 4 million users a month, blah, blah, blah.

But then JP got rid of the team, ditched the lovingly crafted site and imposed their own one, better suited to the Craphampton Argus than our huge international audience. Unique users have halved. 

My defence of Mike is based largely on this. As JP’s short-sightedness did to the websites so it did to the resources that the editor of the paper had at his disposal.

And unsurprisingly when you cut costs, sales fall. Unfortunately, that process will continue under the new ubereditor, John McLellan. This is no reflection on John. He’s a very strong choice. A shrewd, instinctive news man, he has been at TSPL since shortly after the relief of Mafeking. He has a gut feel for the readers. And he has for a long time been the most web-friendly editor at Barclay Towers. Also in the editorial hierarchy he has Tom Little and Ian Stewart, two talented stalwarts who *gasp* have more than a passing acquaintance with the TSPL products.

If anyone can make the (much denied) seven-day model work in practical terms, it’s these guys. Former Marine Ian Stewart’s been shot at, getting subs to work an extra couple of shifts won’t be much of a trial.  But in quality terms the move is a disaster – as is the Record’s similar move. Even Citizen Kane couldn’t save that situation.

It doesn’t take a genius to work out that making the product weaker does not make it more attractive to the customer.

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 [...]]]>

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.

A merger of sorts

Nobody likes this option but nearly everyone agrees it’s the way forward. In its most commonly described form, this is not the solution, however, merely a way of buying a little time for both publications. As things currently stand, if one title took over the other it would pick up so few readers and advertisers as to render the exercise pointless.

However, there is a cleverer way: merge the businesses but keep the titles largely separate. This would involve cutting costs by streamlining the “backroom” functions of both organisations: sales, IT, printing, etc.

Scotland has in it enough talented journalists to make one world-class newsroom strong enough to send the tartanised English editions hameward to think again. With this in mind, some parts of the papers themselves could be “merged” in the sense that the same content for these sections would appear in both papers. The aim here would not be to cut costs but to increase quality. While The Herald and Scotsman have distinct voices when it comes to Scottish news, politics, business, opinion and maybe sport but UK news, foreign news, TV listings and features could be shared between them, if it meant the coverage of these areas was better.

However, this will only work if the economic model behind the papers changes.

A matter of trust

There is no point in someone buying The Scotsman and/or Herald and trying to run them at Johnston Press/Gannett profit levels. The days of screwing 20-35% profit margins out of papers are dead for ever.

Similarly, there is not much point in the papers being bought by a billionaire with an agenda. The Scotsman has already been through that with the Barclays and Andrew Neil. What is required is a set-up that guarantees editorial independence, sustainable returns and reinvestment for the long-term health of the business. This means a trust, along the lines of the ones that own the Irish Times and The Guardian.

Web first

The first thing both papers need to sort out is the online dimension. The Herald site has always been an embarrassment (though it’s classifieds brands, especially S1jobs, are strong). And  scotsman.com was a tremendous property until Johnston Press got involved.

There is still a lot of potential for substantial online revenue, if the sites are managed correctly. Despite the best efforts of JP, scotsman.com is still visited by some two million unique users a month, the Herald by 500,000.

Design: Obviously the sites need to look and work a whole lot better. They should be tag-based sites that offer related articles (naturally), rating, sharing, “most read”, “latest comments”, trackbacks and basically all the functionality we associate with WordPress and other blogging software.

Archives: Every single article possible from the past should be published online. This will drive online revenue from existing editorial assets.

Online first: Stories should be published online first. We want to avoid telling people things that they’ve already known for 18 hours. Reader reaction can then inform what appears in print the next day and help move stories forward. A lot of effort should be put into online only features which drive content to older material. Lists, guides and galleries are wonderful tools for doing this.

Comment: In one year, scotsman.com received 700,000 reader comments, the vast majority of which added a great deal to the value of the site – and its revenue. Comment is a vital tool for any serious online publisher. What scotsman.com lacked and what the Herald’s 9-5 moderators fail to provide is proper moderation. A system will need to be devised to encourage lively debate but keep the “green inkies” at bay.

User generated content: The best way to get people to buy a paper is to put their names in it. And the best way to make them feel valued and involved is to tell their stories. This is not some web2-fanboy suggestion for a reader-written paper. (The skills of writing grammatically, spelling properly, identifying interesting information and presenting it clearly are restricted to a tiny proportion of the population – and not enough journalists.) It is a recognition that we need to get closer to the readers by using their words and pictures. We experimented with this at scotsman.com and it worked very well.

Learn from traffic: scotsman.com was one of Google News’s top 30 sites worldwide. We acheived this by seeing what worked and doing more of it. I’m not suggesting that the Scottish papers of the future should only write stories about sex and kittens but they should take a more analytical approach to what they commission.

Getting clever about online revenue

Many of the new models for journalism being touted (for instance, by Jeff Jarvis) don’t take into account the fact that professional journalists actually want to make a living.

The reason for this is that there is a key problem for online content. For a site to be successful it needs to have unique content, quality content, lots of content and content that does not cost more than the revenue it generates. This is an impossible square to circle. However, The Scotsman and Herald have opportunities to round off the edges a bit.

Get the basics right: First of all, they should be able to properly monetise their existing properties. Certainly, scotsman.com has not been backed up by a sophisticated online advertising team.

Maximise sponsorship: The beauty of a tag-based site is that every keyword becomes a sponsorship opportunity, with the option for each tag’s landing page to be associated with an advertiser. Other properties, such as RSS feeds and email newsletters, are rich sources of ad revenue.

US market: At its height, scotsman.com was attracting 4 million unique users a month (ABCe audited figures). Unsurprisingly, most of that traffic did not come from Scotland but the vast majority of advertising effort went into UK advertising.  A concerted attempt to reach the more lucrative US market with imaginative products should yield very healthy ad revenue.

Hyperlocal ads: Closer to home, not enough effort has been made to make cheap adverts work for small businesses online. There needs to be a realisation that “no ad is too small”.

Reinventing print

Print will never die: The internet does not mean the death of print. It does not mean the death of newspapers. What it means is a reinvention of how print fits into the economic model. Aside from its permanence and intrinsic romance, there will always be a demand for a print product of some kind. Print has advantages over new media in some areas, especially when it comes to consuming longer articles and complex information. However, some things need to change.

More meat, less filler: I heartily recommend Drew Curtis’s “It’s not news, it’s Fark – how mainstream media tries to pass crap off as news” as an exercise in learning what’s wrong with our industry. The days of recycling PA and agency copy to fill space are dead. News agencies big and small frequently post their news stories online so those stories are “out there” hours before their retreaded versions appear on the newspaper stands.

Digests, depth and your paper:

The newspaper of the (very near) future will offer summaries of the stories that people can find elsewhere. It will serve as a resource to point readers towards interesting nuggets in the vast landslide of information they are faced with.

The paper should then offer in-depth coverage of its own exclusives (remember them?) and a couple of major issues of the day. By in-depth, I mean lavish, luscious coverage designed to inform, entertain and amaze – outdoing the tartan editions of the London press.

In terms of sales, the Scottish press needs to learn from the Metro. Cheap news that has been regurgitated from PA is judged to have no value by the market. It is given away free. It is therefore no longer reasonable to ask people to pay for products filled with this kind of material.

However, valuable lessons can be learned from the Metro phenomenon. There is a place for free print products. But these should be thought of mainly as a promotional tool for the main revenue generators: the website and the main printed product.

A key lesson of the collapse in newspaper sales is that tens of thousands of people are no longer willing to spend about a £1 a day for news.

However, I believe there is a market for print as a prestige purchase. Readers like to identify themselves as Scotsman or Herald readers – despite the decline in quality of these titles. There is value here – if a product can be created that feels like it is in the premium bracket. Thanks to advances if print technology papers can now offer personalised editions. Rather than have to buy the “shotgun” mix of stories and sections, readers can be given “their” version of the paper. In my case that would be all the news sections, sport and opinion. (I have no need of re-Heated celeb features.) If that paper was delivered to my home I would be prepared to pay extra for it.

Such personalisation would be carried out online at the moment that the user subscribed to the paper. It is important to note that, despite the stubbornness of UK papers, home delivery is the only way to lock in readers. We have to lower the barriers to them buying the product and that means making it as convenient as possible.

Conclusion

So there’s my plan. Chuck rocks at it. Mock it. But remember that no matter how far-fetched or unreasonable it seems it still makes far more sense than trying to save your business by making the product weaker.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…