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 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…

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

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