We couldn’t help noticing one particular Rory Bremner tweet last night.
And we thought, “Well, WE know someone who predicted those things.”
A couple of months earlier than we were expecting it, we’ve had the Sheriff’s decision on our court hearing a month ago against Kezia Dugdale.
tl;dr version: we won.
From time to time in our Panelbase polls we like to test Scotland’s opinion of its media, since that’s the main focus of our website, and our newest poll was one such time. It found that Scotland’s preferred broadcaster for political coverage was… Channel 4.
The station scored a net +23 rating with respondents, higher than STV (+19), with BBC Scotland trailing in last but still on +16 overall.
The BBC was the only one which had a notable difference in perception between Yes and No voters. C4 got +25 from Nos and a very similar +21 from Yessers, STV was closer still at +20 vs +19, but the BBC had a sizeable gap: just +6 from independence supporters (which is still startlingly high), but a thumping +23 from Unionists.
All broadcasters in Scotland are required by Ofcom rules to be neutral and balanced. We suppose that two out of three more or less managing it isn’t bad.
So it seems our article of earlier today rattled the Herald’s cage but good. Scottish political Twitter has been an absolute logjam of incandescent Herald Group hacks all afternoon, making all manner of wild accusations and threats. At the head of the fury, of course, was Chief Reporter And Witchfinder General Mr David Leask.
Unfamiliar with the Scottish media? God, how we wish THAT was true.
Leask issued a long (long) stream of invective on Twitter, while hiding behind a block that means we can’t post any responses to it that any of his Twitter followers will see. So for the record, we suppose we’ll have to address them here.
This was us for most of yesterday:
Because we were genuinely concerned about this year’s fundraiser. It was coming off the back of our lowest traffic month in four years (February was absolutely dead in Scottish politics, and we had almost no internet for the last two weeks of it), and some other indy sites had had badly underachieving crowdfunders in recent months.
So it’s quite the pleasant surprise to be able to say that the total (direct donations as well as through the fundraising page) for the first 24 hours alone was… £72,429.
The latest Wings Over Scotland annual readership stats are in:
2017 average monthly unique visitors: 303,719
2016 monthly average: 286,162
2015 monthly average: 290,522
(pre-2015 stats from different provider not comparable on a like-for-like basis)
That’s a 6% increase year-on-year, which is pretty respectable going for the dullest 12 months in Scottish politics since this site started (and particularly given the challenging circumstances we had to operate in for the whole of the autumn).
We also found out we were by some distance the most popular website of the Scottish Government, which was nice:
Thank you for all your support, your financial backing, your tip-offs and your company. 2018 is shaping up to be somewhat more interesting, so we hope you’ll stay with us.
Since David Torrance shows no sign of being willing to retract the falsehood below that he tweeted earlier today despite our requests, we’ll have to address it here. Apologies for the indulgence.
We can find nowhere that we made any allegation of Torrance being “paid” by RT. We tweeted that he’d “worked for” them, and said he’d “simply appeared on” the channel. Neither of those statements claims that any money changed hands. If Torrance says that he worked for RT for nothing purely in order to get some free publicity for his book, we’re happy to accept that at face value.
(Although we’re not sure if that makes it better or worse, to be honest.)
But that’s not really the point of all the outrage over “The Alex Salmond Show”, is it?
Wings Over Scotland turned six years old this week (on Tuesday, to be precise). We didn’t make any fuss or hoopla because we didn’t have anything particularly interesting to say about it, although we may as well note in passing that average monthly unique readership for 2017 to date has been 316,015 – that’s 24,000 up on the same period in 2016 and 16,000 higher than January-October 2015, despite this being the dullest year in Scottish politics since the site began.
(We did enjoy the replies to this nice tweet.)
But it’s just been brought to our attention that on our birthday the Scottish Government happened to publish its response to an FOI request from a notoriously mad and creepy Yoon troll who’s been repeatedly banned by Twitter but keeps coming back with new accounts. We thought you’d be modestly amused by it, because the Yoons are raging.
It’s been a difficult few months for a variety of reasons (although some of the technical aspects of that should improve in about a week’s time), but we’ll keep on keeping on.
It’s always interesting to make the news.
But the BBC man seems a little confused.
I apologise in advance to readers for the personal indulgence of this post.
Some months ago, quite coincidentally, I happened to avail myself of Twitter’s archive function, which allows users to download their entire tweet history. For various reasons I’ve been looking at it recently, and until I did I’d been unaware that it records not just a user’s own tweets, but also the tweets from other people that they’ve retweeted.
I’ve collected some of Wings’ tweets and retweets – in reverse chronological order – below. (Famously, of course, RTs aren’t necessarily endorsements, but you can decide on the underlying tone for yourself. Each of them links to the original tweet so you can see the whole conversation, or click on the links being referenced.)
They’re all on one subject, by way of illustration, because Twitter is a transient medium full of people all too eager to jump at the slightest excuse to make spurious and hateful allegations about everything (and anyone) under the sun to serve their own agendas, and for the sake of the future of human discourse it’s worth remembering that nothing exists in isolation or free of context, and we shouldn’t jump too easily to conclusions.
Because the other way never ends anywhere good.
.
A very brief stat post, as our “regular” cartoonist is on holiday YET AGAIN.
Wings had just over 300,000 unique readers in June, despite taking the last couple of weeks off ourselves, bringing the monthly average readership for the first half of 2017 to 346,226. That’s 55,532 up on the same period last year, or a 19% increase.
Rarely can a flush have been more busted.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
