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.

After lunch there was a panel session titled: What does the election result mean for publishers and startups?

Dave Harte, who chaired the discussion, started off by talking about the change in government.

Sion Simon, the former MP and government minister, said that he expexted the change in government would have a negative impact on journalism. While he said that the broad picture would ‘not be a million miles away from what it was,’ it would still be worse. He said there would be less govt money avaialbe. ‘If you thought the previous govt didn’t seem that interested, believe me, the present one won’t be at all interested,’ he said.

There was a lot of work by the last govt. done on open data started by Tom Watson, he said, which the civil service had absorbed. ‘There were really serious plans to open up data massively in the second half of the coalition. I can’t see any reason why that won’t continue.’

Mark Pack said that one of the impacts will be that there’ll be a huge amount of information that anyone can start to make sense of.

Stuart Kirkpatrick: From a commercial point of view is over the Independently Funded News Consortia. He said he was heartened that the Conservatives would be getting rid of them. STV, having heard it will miss out on £7m funding as a result of that cut, is employing 10 new journalists.

Sion Simon: The bill dealed with the pilots - for which contracts haven’t been signed. The The Tories have said the full national roll out won’t happen. Whether the regional pilots will go ahead is not clear.

From the floor Chris Taggart said that the new governments’ ideas of allowing the public to take control of some public institutions, such as schools, could be very significant for journalism and could be helped by the new open data movement.

Coalition

Mark said that it might help to make journalism easier. It, he said, exposed how narrow some Westminster journalists’ frame of reference was, because there was so little reference to Scotland, where coalition governments have existed since 1999.

Sion said that he didn’t think it would make much difference. He pointed out that every government has a honeymoon. He said the first few months of Tony blair’s government was like ‘living in a pink candyfloss cloud’.

He said the notion of a coalition is one that there is an immediate sympathy among the public. Newspapers, Sion said, attempt to reflect their readers. Over time, he said, it would give way to the fact that the whole of journalism is propelled by the desire to bring down the political class - the tension between the fourth and elected state. ‘When the honeymoon is over that dynamic will reassert itself,’ he said.

Openess

Anna Blackaby of the Birmingham Post asked about the difficulty of getting information out of commercial, but public organisations.

Matt said that he tried to ensure that openess was there as a principle before other things got in the way. He said it was important to be as open as possible.

Sion said the ‘micro level’ problem will be solved by the trend of open data, because he believed that the civil service culture had now been changed so significantly that it could not be reversed. He said ‘They now know the game is up,’ referring to the senior civil servants in Whitehall.

Stuart Kirkpatrick pointed out that there may have been a change in the public mood, as a result of the expenses scandal.

Chris Taggart said he didn’t think there’d be a move as a whole in the public sector. The tendering process had not helped and there are still too many incentives to do big, slow projects.

Philip John said there could be a risk that the open data movement might be undermined by the Big Society, because these services might not be controlled by private or voluntary organisations.

Matt said he was wary of a trade-off between cuts in services and open data. He pointed out that open data could be used to improve services.

Mark talked about the Office of the Public Guardian, which due to the bureaucracy and cost involved meant it was effectively a service only available to the middle classes. The foundation of the organisation had effectively shifted accountability from the government to the office.

Was it an internet election?

Sion talked about Jon Bound’s point that the difference between our recent election and the US election was one of access. Instead of using new media to engage and to give them ownership, British parties used it in an old-media way, effectively as a means to broadcast.

The power of social media is in finding people, identifying where they are and what they’re interested in.

Mark said the potential for any political party that hits controversy will find grassroots members much more power.