Scotsman.com Ex Editor Gloats On Site Slump: ‘Told You So’
Gloating from the afterlife, former Scotsman.com editor Stewart Kirkpatrick has poured a torrent of “told-you-so” on the news site’s present-day proprietors, using his appropriately named Sour Alba blog to accuse Johnston Press of “ruining” the publication with its December 2007 redesign.
Kirkpatrick, who started with Scotsman.com in 2000 but who quit in 2006 for consulting, wrote: “I knew that traffic would tank. I warned Tim Bowder, the JP chief executive, of this face-to-face, saying the JP redesign would lose ‘millions of page views and hundreds of thousands of users’. My warning was ignored and a JP apparatchik later explained that I had not understood how good their plans were.”
Kirkpatrick gloated that traffic has halved since he left, as testified by our contribution to the war-of-words – a picture; this chart of ABCe traffic since 2002, which, in fairness, shows that the rot began before the redesign (though still after Kirkpatrick’s exit).
It’s not the first time Kirkpatrick has unleashed a can of whoopass on his former employer – he’s previously labelled Johnston execs “muppets” responsible for killing Scottish journalism, and admits to being “slightly biased towards the version created when I was editor”.
JP digital manager John Bradshaw retired in June after former AOL (NYSE: TWX) UK strategy VP Lori Cunningham replacing Alex Green as digital director. Johnston, which is waiting to replace outgoig CEO Bowdler with Archant’s John Fry and has seen its share price collapse as it debt blossomed, this week committed to publish ABCe stats for more papers – at this rate, it will beware former editors with blogs.
I'm sorry if my post came across as gloating. It was born of sadness and anger, not glee. Sadness because I still care passionately about the dear old Hootsmon -it's in my blood. Anger because the hard work of a talented and committed team was thrown away so carelessly.
The rot may have begun before the redesign but it was after JP had banned all development on the existing Scotsman website and were systematically removing every last member of the team responsible.
I think it's harsh to accuse Kirkpatrick of gloating; he's one of only a few qualified voices to note the decline of a site that we all used to admire, and which achieved great things on a relatively tiny budget. The real story here is the decline of the Scotsman site, which is truly remarkable, as well as the (always) abject Herald effort from across the M8. Given the general malaise of Scottish media, you have to question what the future holds for digital news in the country.
It's obvious Stewart cares a lot, though there was a definite "told you so".
Anyway, as a sidenote – anyone know how S1 can be making a claimed £10 million a year?
….This article may be barking up the wrong tree. The reported "decline" also coincided with the switch of website stats package a move from Webtrends 6 to Webtrends 8 which very significantly affected user and page stats.
The issue of sites using different webstats packages is one that also came to light a few months ago when the Telegraph reported a large jump in figures…
The ABCe need to be more vocal about this issue
The following comment comes not from me but from Bruce Combe, who had a problem posting it here…
As a former employee of scotsman.com from 2000-2007 and the designer responsible for the previous incarnation of the website, I feel I might have something to contribute here…
Firstly, whilst the drop in traffic has been dramatic, possibly even more so than the current ABCe unique user figure would indicate, the above graph is not actually that indicative of the actual traffic to scotsman.com. In order to see an truly accurate picture of what has happened over the last couple of years you'd need to see a monthly page impression graph (which isn't skewed by large referrers like Drudge and Fark), unfortunately the page impression figure has been suspiciously omitted from Johnston Press's new ABCe reports… Whilst many would argue that page impressions are not that valuable as a statistic for measuring the performance of websites, in the case of publishers like Scotsman.com they relate directly to ad revenue and are therefore vital to measuring the performance of the site.
However, Robert is correct in saying the "rot began before the redesign ". It began shortly after JP took over the Scotsman at the start of 06 and began to accelerate from August onwards as the staff of the website were forced into an untenable position which resulted in a mass exodus. Page impressions were still pretty stable throughout 2006 though (especially after we launched the comments system in the spring) – it was during 2007 that things began to slide as more and more of the site was neglected. It's pretty much accepted amongst former employees that at the end of 2007 when the site relaunched, there was a sharp drop in page impressions – probably around the 50% mark. Wilson's mention of the change to webtrends is probably only significant in that it may have boosted the figures after the relaunch. Up until I left we ran ABCe compliant analytics tools (of our own creation) based on the log files daily as well as HBX and I believe these continued to run for several months after I left.
Secondly, Johnston Press was (and still is) very very careful about making public statements regarding the performance of it's websites for the simple reason that all of their digital operation is massively under performing. For example, the recent ABCe figure of 5.9 million unique users for their network of sites as a whole is inclusive of their classified operations – JobsToday.co.uk, PropertyToday.co.uk and MotorsToday.co.uk – yet no mention is made of individual traffic for these sites (or page impressions for that matter). Even a quick look at Alexa or Google website Trends will give an indication of just how poorly these sites are doing.
The reason for all of this can be laid firmly at the feet of those members of JP management mentioned in the blog post: John Bradshaw, Alex Green and Tim Bowdler – all of whom have now departed the company. There's absolutely no question that the damage done to scotsman.com was not only unnecessary but a been a great loss to the Scottish media.
On the bright side though, most of the core team responsible for the design, development and day to day operation of scotsman.com are now busily trying to make something the Scottish media can be proud of at list.co.uk and stv.tv (i'm at the List btw).
And on the subject of S1…
Robert, i have no idea about the revenue figures, but S1 could easily be doing that well. Good as scotsman.com was, it's classified operation never grew to the scale of S1Jobs because of restrictions favouring print ads that were placed on model we used. Combined with JP's current poor offering they've never really had any serious competition in Scotland – they've also managed to run and develop it separate to main newspaper operation which has worked to their advantage. Have a look at the ABCe figures and you'll see that they could be making a tidy sum just from impressionable advertising alone.