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Archive: Sunday Herald

Iain Macwhirter and the relationship between the media and bloggers

29 April 2009 00:32

Categories: Blogging, Current affairs, Internet, Media, Newspapers, Radio, Scotland, Technology, Television

Iain Macwhirter's critique of blogging

A series of posts

  1. Iain Macwhirter inadvertently criticised the media
  2. Iain Macwhirter and the relationship between the media and bloggers

Part one of this article was published yesterday

Further evidence that Iain Macwhirter is struggling to see beyond the model of the media comes from the fact that the blogs he cites as “very good and intelligent” are both offerings from the media. Paul Krugman’s blog is funded by the New York Times while Robert Peston’s is run by the BBC.

Interestingly, the one he criticises — aside from Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes — is by established journalist Alex Massie, whose blog is hosted by The Spectator. (Incidentally, Alex Massie’s evisceration of Iain Macwhirter’s original article is well worth a read.) There is still no sign that Mr Macwhirter will deign to read the output of someone who isn’t sharing his ivory tower.

He also makes the point about bloggers being geeks, citing the fact that a lot of it relies on the dark art of SEO. He says that “there is a science to blogging”. This may be so, certainly for the larger blogs out there. But let’s be clear about this — you don’t need to know SEO to blog. You just have to write. The barriers to entry are incredibly low. I started blogging when I was at school and it was years before I even learnt what SEO was, never mind begin to implement the techniques. It didn’t stop me from blogging. You can learn as you go along. Or you can choose not to, if you wish.

Whatever, it is a hell of a lot more accessible than the media. How do I go about getting a column in a newspaper? The short answer is that I can’t. Want to be a blogger? Sign up to WordPress.com or Blogger and you’ve already made it.

Where Iain Macwhirter is probably closest to being right is in his point about personal attacks on the blogosphere. It is true that there is rather too much of this. But it usually comes from the same four or five bloggers, and I don’t read any of them.

Sometimes people (including, I confess, me) bemoan the fact that there is still no Scottish Guido Fawkes. But in a way we should be relieved that this brash and divisive model is not replicated in the Scottish political scene.

The Scottish blogosphere is actually a fairly pleasant place, as has been noted by IoC. Will Patterson, in his letter to The Herald, pointed out that you can read about the great blogging that goes on every week on Scottish Roundup.

I like to think that the Roundup has helped foster a friendly atmosphere in the Scottish blogosphere. We do, of course, have our differences. But that is what you expect in a debate. By and large, we are a respectful and friendly bunch. Despite our political differences, I think there is a clear Scottish political blogging community. A fair bunch of us will be attending a meet-up later today. And it always amazes me that even those with the strongest political views can put their differences aside and give rival viewpoints a fair airing when they are invited to edit the Scottish Roundup. Stephen Glenn is a typical example of this.

There is, of course, the phenomenon of the Cybernats, which is a problem. But it’s not a problem with blogging. The truly swivel-eyed will never find a decent platform for themselves on the blogosphere. That is because it is too easy to ignore a bad blogger — you simply don’t read the blog.

Where Cybernattery is a problem is in comments. As I have pointed out a number of times before, the nature of comments is very different to the nature of blogging. I suspect Iain Macwhirter’s impression of blogging comes mainly from the comments to his own pieces, which is a shame because they are no doubt awful. He says, “This has now become institutionalised in the form of the blog, which is an extension of this kind of citizen journalism.” But it is a major mistake to assume that bloggers and commenters are the same people, or even vaguely close relatives.

As Macwhirter himself points out, bloggers want to be read. But as I have noted, it is easy to ignore a blogger by simply not reading. So the truly awful commenters would never succeed as bloggers because they simply will not get read and won’t make any impact.

That is precisely why websites like The Herald, Scotsman.com, Comment is free, the BBC’s Have Your Say, Digg and YouTube suffer from having terrible comments. Because these are huge websites, commenters know they are guaranteed an audience. Unlike a blogger, they don’t have to build an audience by producing quality content. They already have the spotlight they crave so that they can spout out their nonsense. Bloggers produce a higher-quality product because they need to come up with the goods or people will not read. Commenters believe they will have people reading anyway.

That is not, of course, a criticism of all comments. Small and medium-sized blogs generally have great comment sections, and I am lucky to be able to count this blog among the medium-sized blogs that generally have thriving and friendly comments sections. It is the big media sites that attract bad commenters like files on a poop.

To tie all the loose ends together, the point — as everyone agrees — is that the media landscape is changing. Kezia Dugdale has a good overview of what’s going on.

A recent piece in the Sunday Herald suggested that my blogs get the sort of readership that a local newspaper can expect. That was news to me, and it rather sums up just how different the world of the media is becoming. While the blogosphere grows and grows, the likes of The Scotsman and The Herald are struggling to scrape together enough coppers to fund next week’s editions.

This makes the way the media approaches the web all-important. Johnston Press’s decision to rip the perfectly adequate Scotsman.com to shreds and implement their own shaky template has effectively put a nail in their own coffin. Traffic has halved since they took over. The Herald’s web presence has always been dire, and signs for the future are not good.

Given this state of affairs, the relationship between blogging and the media will become ever-more important. Everyone in this arena is still feeling their way around in an uncertain new world, and everyone will make mistakes along the way. The media could be helped significantly if their most high-profile commentators had a modicum of awareness of what the real strengths of blogging actually are.

« Previous in series — »

2 comments

Blogging and the future of journalism

8 March 2009 02:03

Categories: Admin, Blogging, Current affairs, General, Internet, Media, Newspapers, Politics, Scotland, Technology

This week I helped out Peter John Meiklem on a story for the Sunday Herald about the future of journalism. Amid all the job losses in the Scottish media, the piece looks at whether bloggers can step up to the plate and begin to supplant traditional media outlets.

My view has long been that blogging is best consumed as a complement to professional journalism, as you’ll see if you read the piece. But of coruse there are other views out there, which the article also represents.

There are a few points I thought I’d mention, just to expand on or clarify a few points. It’s worth remembering what we mean when we talk about web stats. It’s a thorny area, and there isn’t really a good way to accurately estimate how many unique visitors a website has. I tend to look at visits rather than unique visitors because I think it’s more unambiguous.

I was a bit vague on the telephone about how many visitors this blog gets. I knew that all of my blogs put together get over 10,000 visits per month (this is the number I keep in my head because it’s nice and round, and it’s also sufficiently large to sound relatively impressive). In this case, it’s bad luck that the number of unique visitors to this blog in the month in question was 8,465. Not quite the >10,000 mentioned in the article, though if you throw in the numbers for my F1 blog vee8 it nudges above 10,000 unique visitors.

Apparently 10,000 per month is a similar readership to many local newspapers. I don’t know if this refers to the circulation of the hard copy or the figures for a local paper’s website.

Certain bloggers, who regularly post indulgent stat pr0n posts, get quite excited about how many visitors they get. But it’s worth remembering just how meaningless most visits actually are. Okay, this blog gets roughly 10,000 visitors a month. But it would be pure delusion to believe that there are 10,000 people out there who just can’t wait to read what I have to say.

Only an eighth of those visitors came here directly (i.e. on purpose). Over two-thirds of the visitors to this blog come from search engines. Of these, 94% have never come across this blog before. And 86% of search engine visitors to this blog look at one page and leave, spending on average a paltry 40 seconds here. They will probably never come back again, no doubt having failed to find what they were looking for. All-in-all, only 13% of this blog’s readers are returning for a second visit. Kudos to the 1% who have visited 100 times or more.

Of course, as always, these statistics come with all sorts of health warnings. Then there is the fact that many people are able to read blogs without ever having to visit, thanks to the magic of RSS. For what it’s worth, according to Feedburner, 270 people are subscribed to this blog.

Partly because of all the problems of getting accurate figures, I don’t get as hung up on stats as I used to. I like to know where traffic is coming from if someone has linked to this blog, but the numbers don’t excite me as much any more.

It’s come a long way though. I remember when I started out blogging, I used to be a bit freaked out when I saw the blog had had 60 visits in a day. That must have meant that I had (accidentally) said something too controversial or someone had ripped me to shreds and linked to it. Given that I was so young when I started blogging, they were probably right to do so. Eventually, getting 60 a day was the norm. Now 300 a day is a disappointment.

In the piece I am quoted as saying, “The average age of a blogger is around 40.” I don’t think that’s quite what I said (and I certainly didn’t intend to say that). I think the average age of the readers of political blogs is 40. My impression — it’s just a guess — is that the bloggers themselves are generally younger than that. But the point about blogging is that it can be — and is — done by people from all sorts of backgrounds. The eclecticism of the blogosphere is, of course, one of its biggest attractions.

As for the idea that the average reader of a political blog is aged 40, this is something I heard or read a long time ago and the source is long lost. I do like to pluck it out from time to time though to illustrate that blogging is not just a young person’s game. A quick search has yielded this study (PDF) which found that the median age of a political blog reader in the USA in 2006 was 49.

Another thing I wanted to mention was that the piece says that Guido Fawkes broke the story about North Lanarkshire Council’s head of communications job. In fact, my post about it was published about an hour before Guido’s, though I understand if more people came to learn about it through Guido. It’s also true that Gudio went a lot further, by actually naming the people involved, which I was reluctant to do.

Anyway, it’s great to have been quoted so much in the Sunday Herald this morning. I don’t mean to come across as sniping — inaccuracies are always bound to creep in, and you certainly couldn’t say that bloggers are much less error-prone.

One of the great things about having a blog though is that it allows me to clarify a couple of things which I said when I was working from the top of my head. That is one area where the blogosphere definitely has the upper hand over traditional media. On an open blog, some pedant like me will soon be along to point out the mistakes in the comments section. But the newspaper will never be corrected.

12 comments

The Scottish press in freefall?

24 February 2009 20:18

Categories: *, Current affairs, Media, Newspapers, Scotland, Technology

It’s no secret that the Scottish media is going through a particularly tough time at the moment. In a sense, the past decade or so can probably be described as one long tough time. Job cuts have been piled upon job cuts. With sales plummeting, advertising revenues shrinking and the uncertain world of new media, the credit crunch is simply the icing on the cake.

Just yesterday it was announced that seventy jobs at Trinity Mirror will go once production of the Daily Record and the Sunday Mail merges into a single operation. That amounts to a quarter of editorial staff.

The state of the Scottish press was one of the subjects discussed on Newsnight Scotland yesterday (from 18:07). BBC Scotland’s business and economy editor Douglas Fraser (himself a former Herald journalist) noted that when The Herald and the Sunday Herald did something similar, more people requested redundancy than the Herald Group was actually looking for. On his blog he wrote:

It doesn’t say much about working at those heavier titles to find management has even more voluntary redundancies than they had wanted.

It’s worth remembering also that last year staff at those newspapers held strikes in protest at cuts. But it might not be just the Herald group of newspapers which has become a more difficult place to work. Costs at all newspapers are constantly being cut, but the newspapers are churning out just as much content as before. If anything, they are producing more content as a result of the 24 hour news cycle, and the need to keep websites constantly updated.

Today I have received an email informing me that North Lanarkshire Council has (presumably accidentally) published details of shortlisted candidates for the role of Head of Corporate Communications and Marketing. The job went to Stephen Penman, who used to be deputy editor of the Sunday Herald.

I am reluctant to elaborate too far further in case it annoys any of the people concerned. But the list has been published publicly, albeit without forenames, so you may be able to join the dots. My informant seems certain that the list contains a number of big names from various newspapers and public affairs firms.

No doubt the job of Head of Communications at a local council tends to attract candidates with a background in journalism and public affairs. But the calibre of these applicants is quite striking. There is an Associate Editor for the Scottish version of a major UK-wide newspaper; Group Content Editor for a major Scottish newspaper group; possibly Group Political Editor for a national newspaper group and a columnist for a Scottish newspaper. There is also at least one person, and maybe two, who currently work for private sector public affairs / PR companies.

Whatever you make of it, it has spurred someone to email me. He says: “Considering these names there is a rush to get out of the dead tree press and the private sector and into the safe harbour of the public sector.”

It’s pretty clear that the Scottish press is in turmoil just now. With devolution, there is more politics going on than there used to be, and it is the media’s job to keep on top of it. But ever since devolution, Scottish papers have increasingly struggled to make ends meet in the face of the internet revolution. The government is stronger, but the media is weaker — and that’s a dangerous situation to be in.

It seems likely that this town ain’t big enough for both The Scotsman and The Herald. Many see it as a foregone conclusion that both papers will be dead before long unless something radical is done. Recently Stewart Kirkpatrick, former editor of Scotsman.com, wrote a blog post on what such radical action may look like.

With the latest news coming from Trinity Mirror, it looks as though Scotland’s main tabloid newspaper will similarly struggle. It seems as though even in the best case scenario for the Scottish media, a lot more jobs are going to go and the Scottish press is going to be a lot weaker.

7 comments

Be careful what you delete from the web

26 November 2007 04:57

Categories: Blogging, Current affairs, Internet, Politics, Scotland, Technology

If you are a user of the internet (which you are) then you have to be really careful what you publish on it. Even if you think you can’t delete something, you can’t. While on the screen it looks like it’s disappeared, in reality there is a huge probability that all of the data will remain somewhere.

The most well-known example is Google Cache, which is the copy of each document on the web that Google uses to assess whether or not it is helpful to your search. This can also be used by anyone who wants to see what used to be on a page that has since been deleted or changed, if Google’s bot visited the page at the right time.

Another example is the Wayback Machine which literally visits web pages and archives them. Forever. Internet users can — to a point — browse the web as it was even in the mid-1990s. For example, here is the Microsoft website as it was in 1996.

But it is not just huge central databases like Google that can thwart self-censors. Everyday internet users are doing it all the time. Thanks to the popularity of RSS, there is now little chance that anyone who publishes an RSS feed will ever be able to hide their content. Anyone who is subscribed to your RSS feed has access to that content for as long as they want.

If you use a desktop-based RSS reader the files will actually be on your computer. But I use Google Reader, and I have access to every single blog post written by Gavin Yates since the 29th of May 2007. It looks like the Sunday Herald have as well, and possibly more.

Gavin Yates is Wendy Alexander’s new head of communications, a job which seems to be somewhat of a poisoned chalice. Brian Lironi left the post just a few days after Wendy Alexander took office, seemingly because he was fed up with the new Scottish Labour leader.

Then last week Matthew Marr was given the heave-ho after a drunken performance at the Scottish Politician of the Year Awards (a bit oxymoronic if you ask me). Particular attention was given to the fact that Mr Marr called Alex Salmond a cunt. While a lot of bloggers pointed out that he was probably right, it’s not very good conduct and you would expect much better behaviour from such an important Labour official.

And while Mr Marr was keen to point out that the incident was “entirely out of character”, bloggers lined up to say that it was in character. Mr Eugenides was “reliably informed”, while Osama Saeed and Mark McDonald have both been at the receiving end of one of Marr’s verbal outbursts.

Now Gavin Yates has run into difficulties before he’s even started. Some of what he wrote on his blog has been less than flattering about Labour and Wendy Alexander, as the Sunday Herald story points out.

The thing is, this needn’t be a problem. Surely a bit of reality, a bit of honesty, is what Wendy Alexander and Scottish Labour really need. I do wonder, though, if the culture within the party means that only yes-men are tolerated. This is presumably what drove Gavin Yates to delete his blog. Yet, as usual, it is the cover-up rather than the original ‘crime’ which makes this an embarrassing episode for Labour.

As Will P points out, Gavin Yates’s excuse does not make sense.

My comments have been taken out of context. I wrote them as a journalist in July and they do not reflect my own views. I think Wendy Alexander is a winner as is Andy Kerr.

A blog that doesn’t reflect your own views? Whose views do they reflect then? Nor was this just a few posts in July as he tries to make out. He was critical of Labour as recently as September.

But as I say, there really is nothing particularly damning about the blog posts themselves. Skimming through the archives of his blog, the criticisms he made of Labour were mostly sensible and constructive. He didn’t say anything that is truly embarrassing.

Like I say, it could have been seen as a much-needed dose of reality for the Scottish Labour elite. In fact, his blog posts demonstrate that he has a pretty good idea of the SNP’s strengths as well as Labour’s weaknesses. This ought to bode well for him in his new post.

It is the fact that Gavin Yates felt the need to delete his blog that makes it the story. It has become the forbidden fruit. But in this day and age, once you publish something on the web, there is no going back. I alone have access to 48 of his posts, just by making a few clicks in Google Reader. By deleting his blog, Gavin Yates has created a lot of interest in what he wrote — and access to it is by no means impossible.

Another blogger, Kezia Dugdale, filled the post on an temporary basis. She made the very wise decision of keeping her blog going (although there is seemingly never any danger of her going off-message). Gavin Yates should have taken note. Keeping your blog up there will do less harm than trying to remove it — because actually removing it is impossible.

It is amusing to think that for all the hype about bloggers and their ability to scrutinise, it could be your own blog, rather than other people’s, that is the most dangerous.

4 comments

Hats off to The Daily Mail

28 August 2007 15:05

Categories: Blogging, Current affairs, Entertainment, Internet, Newspapers, Technology

I don’t say this often, but I have to hand it to the Daily Mail. And I’m not being sarcastic! Because their website is really rather good.

Last week some journalists got all excited because the latest ABCe figures came out, telling them just how many people are reading their words. Marcus Warren from The Telegraph (or TCUK as it is apparently now known… Christ) said:

As is always the way with statistics, everyone has something to crow about in last week’s ABC Electronic figures for July, most notably the Daily Mail. Theirs was certainly the headline-grabbing performance , one so impressive that it appeared to shock most of the blogging media pudits into silence. All power to the Mail then.

Telegraph link via Martin Stabe.

The Media Guardian report says that the Daily Mail website was visited by 11,865,039 unique users, over three quarters of whom are visiting from outside the UK. (Insert your own “they come to our country stealing our bandwidth” joke here.) This makes it the most popular newspaper website apart from Guardian Unlimited.

It’s astonishing in one way because just a few years ago the Daily Mail did not even have a website. Now it has one of the most popular in the country. You have to admit that their website is pretty slick compared to a lot of newspaper websites.

This is probably helped by the fact that it is relatively new. A lot of newspaper websites were designed several years ago. In the intervening period they have had to shoehorn in features like RSS feeds, blogs, comment systems, social bookmarking and goodness knows what else. These websites are now cluttered full of stuff that they were not originally designed to accommodate. Sometimes jumping from page to page presents you with jarring differences in style (hello, Guardian Unlimited).

The Daily Mail, meanwhile, produced a slick website that had all of these features from the get-go. Maybe a few years down the line the Mail’s website will also begin to creak heavily due to old age. But there is something else that sets the Daily Mail website apart from the others.

The Mail’s website makes heavy use of images. Each article is full of images, and they are not tiny little ones stuck in the corner. In fact, most of them take up the same width as a paragraph. It looks fantastic.

On many other newspaper websites, all too often you could find yourself reading an article that does not have any images in it, even if the original print version did. This is especially irritating when the article actually makes reference to the image. This is not much use if you are using the website where you can’t see it!

Perhaps for this very reason, whenever I follow a link to the Daily Mail‘s website, I usually find myself exploring one or two more pages before going away. Its design and approach actually encourages me to read further, even though I am the sort of person who would not touch a hard copy of the Daily Mail with a bargepole!

Holyrood Watcher has recently been complaining about newspaper websites. He seems to have been set off by the website of the Sunday Herald. And who could blame him? It is a truly dire website.

I mean, just look at it. If you read the bit in the top right hand corner that says “Est. 1999″ you might be tempted to think that this was the last time the website was touched. But no. The Sunday Herald must be one of the few MSM websites that has actually become worse over time.

Compare today’s front page with a few from years gone by that I have found on the Wayback Machine. even better in 2002.

Today? It is almost as if they want to turn visitors away. The older versions hint at masses of content to choose from. Check out the navigation links on the left-hand side of the old sites — nowhere to be seen today. Now there is just a list of three stories from each section, with no images like the old websites. Astonishingly stale and not at all enticing.

I have only spoken about the design so far. There are also the technical problems that Holyrood Watcher mentions. I missed what happened last Sunday, but I know the problem with words running into each other. In fact, it seems to happen on practically every article these days. Check out the first few paragraphs of this week’s main story:

SEVEN PEOPLE, including two girls, were last night being heldoverthekillingof 11-year-old Rhys Jones. Five were arrested in raids yesterdayaroundtheCroxteth area of Liverpool, wheretheschoolboy was shot on Wednesday.

Police were granted an extension to detain the sixth, a boy of 15, who was arrested on Friday.

Theyarresteda seventh teenager last night. The 19-year-old man from the local area is being questioned by detectives on suspicion of murder.

This takes the total of people in custodylastnighttoseven.Nine have been arrested in total, with two currently on bail.

I mean, how does this even happen? Is it not easy to fix? It really is as if nobody checks to make sure the website is working properly. I don’t understand why they do not just move the Sunday Herald‘s content onto The Herald‘s website, which is miles better.

Holyrood Watcher also makes a good point about The Scotsman (which is down at the moment of writing!). In this era of Web 2.0, blogging and all the rest of it, what use is their potentially interesting content doing behind a subscription wall?

I don’t know how much traffic newspaper sites get from blogs, but it must be quite a lot these days. Yet The Scotsman locks away the content that bloggers would be most likely to link to. Newspapers that persist on locking their content away need to look to The Guardian, the most popular newspaper website around. It seems to survive perfectly fine without having to offer any “premium” content.

I have no complaints about the design of The Times website. They recently radically overhauled the design of the website and it looks tip-top now (although a lot of people probably still wonder — why lime green?). And they managed to achieve it all in one go, unlike the uncomfortable bit-by-bit redesign of Guardian Unlimited.

But, as Holyrood Watcher points out, where is Ecosse now? David Farrer complained about it way back in February. He was told that it would come back, but it is still nowhere to be seen.

A couple of weeks ago I spotted Ryan Morrison saying:

BBC News is in need of a major redesign to bring it inline with the web2.0 world. There are so many new concepts, ideas and services surrounding the new web that the old News Template is creaking a bit.

He has a point. As I mentioned before, most of the newspaper websites have been struggling to smoothly integrate Web 2.0 features into their old websites.

But I think the BBC News website is a lot better than its rivals from the press. The pages are not nearly as cluttered and are still pleasant to look at. This is no doubt helped by the fact that they do not contain obtrusive adverts that the other sites have to carry.

Of all of the news sites on the internet, I like BBC News the most by far. At the moment my second port of call is Scotsman.com, but only because the current “under reconstruction” nature of Guardian Unlimited really gets on my nerves.

For more on newspaper websites, check out Martin Belam’s astonishingly in-depth posts at Currybet.

4 comments