Stuart Kirkpatrick is the founder of the Caledonian Mercury.

Stuart brought together a team of experience journalists, who are freelance, to form the Caledonian Mercury, published on WordPress MU, which launched in January as Scotland’s first online-only daily news site.

Its aims are:

• To be innovative and inventive
• Make money from journalism - he was hoping it could appeal to the many Caledonians living around the world.
• Last more than three months!

He calls his model ‘the Economist meets the Huffington Post drinking Irn Bru’. He said he felt it was important to be unique and go for depth coverage in profitable niches.

The paper has already had over one million page impressions, over 5000,000 visitors and 8,000 plus intelligent comments. CM also got a Highly Commended’ in the Newspaper Awards.

User Interaction

While UI is key to the website’s success, Stuart said he’s spent a lot of time dealing with the results of less well considered remarks on the site. he pointed out that it’s legally better, oddly, not to monitor comments.

Stuart said that his chief challenge is advertising, since its the core of his business. Particularly difficult, he said, was learning to be nice to them.

There are other issues, including - the site, hosting and legal (which keeps him awake at night). Stuart also pointed out that it was essential to spend money in order to find audience, including traditional advertising, which poses problems, partly obviously financial.

What’s coming

They have gone from 10 to 14 reporters and are more engaged in multimedia production now. There will at some point be a publicaton, probably quarterly.

Stuart, kindly, finished on a positive note, albeit rounding it off with a caveat: there’s never been a better time to be a journalist… And there’s never been a worse time to get a job as one.

He also argued that the future of journalism isn’t the future of print. It’s about journalists coming together to form their own projects - cutting out the machinery of newspaper publishers.

Afterwards said some intersting things during the questions:

• Stuart said that his main revenue streams are relationship-based sales to advertisers. Enquiries to the site and network sales, such as Google. Stuart said that nobody is going to get rich off.
• He also said that he was hoping for between 20 and 30,000 unique visitors a day by the end of the year.
• He said his background helped in opening doors, partly because Scotland is a relatively small media environment. He also said he expected that more startups would follow the Calie Merc route. While some would fail, he said he believed that others, too, would be successful.