Alan Formby-Jackson

The Caledonian Mercury launched today. Stewart Kirkpatrick, who ran scotsman.com from 2000 to 2007, has set the site up and will be its editor. He has financed the business with his two partners at their marketing consultancy, W00tonomy.
The site will use freelancers to produce content and will be promoted entirely with web-based and viral marketing. Kirkpatrick is hoping to break even with 20,000 to 30,000 unique users a day, reading between 1m and 2m pages a month.

The design is simple, neat and easy to navigate. Coloured links sit at the top while, at the moment, there are about 20 stories with four to five lines of intro listed with pictures which you can scroll down.
Down the right are promos to other stories, a Google map of Scotland which links to more stories and, in a bid to gather intelligent comments, they’re offering prizes like a bottle of Jura 10-year-old Classic Island Malt Best for comment of the week and a two-night stay in The Jura Lodge for best comment of the month. Sounds good to me.

Stewart says:

We are proud to welcome you to the Caledonian Mercury, Scotland’s first truly online newspaper. The Mercurius Caledonius was Scotland’s first print newspaper, founded in 1660 by Thomas Sydserf. We have revived its historic title because we lay claim to the great Scottish tradition of journalistic innovation.

We seek to revive Scottish journalism by using the internet rather than railing against it. The Caledonian Mercury stands for intelligent reporting, informed analysis and raising the standard of debate in Scottish life. It also seeks to return journalism to journalists and is a platform to display the work of selected specialist writers – freed from the demands of filling space, toeing the line and “feeding the beast”.

Read the rest of his welcome on the site here.
The Guardian also reports on the launch today here.
You can follow the Caledonian Mercury on Twitter @CalMerc
Watch the video of Stewart Kirkpatrick talking about his new project here.
Read Stewart’s blog post at allmediascotland here.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 25th, 2010 at 10:57 am and is filed under Newspapers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.