Wings Over Scotland

It’s always interesting to make the news.

But the BBC man seems a little confused.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

Click pic to go to the Indiegogo fundraiser page, or click here to use PayPal.
All-sources total as of 9am, Tuesday 25 July: £11,640.

.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

…for one idiot and an occasional cartoonist talking to a country of only 4m adults.

And one of us DOESN’T EVEN LIVE THERE!!!!!

Read the rest of this entry →

I went to the dentist this morning, and boy was I ever in for a shock when I got back.

So I guess we’d better talk about this for a minute.

Read the rest of this entry →

Actually, mighty King Leonidas is understating here. It was 311% in the end.

Wings Over Scotland 2017 fundraiser total: £140,047.

Read the rest of this entry →

Normally the amateur blogger, unqualified would-be economist and unsuccessful dog-food salesman that BBC Scotland and the Daily Record employ on a regular basis to openly troll Yes voters restricts himself, when attacking this site, to crude abuse or smear and innuendo like the below, tweeted on Holocaust Memorial Day last year:

Last night, implausibly, he sank lower.

Read the rest of this entry →

You very rarely get useful stats about online newspaper readership, so we were quite intrigued by this snippet on tonight’s BBC2 Scotland documentary “Paper Thistle”, about the 200th anniversary of The Scotsman.

We don’t know what the numbers are or how brief the period was, but Wings’ average traffic is higher now than it was in 2014, while we suspect The Scotsman is moving in the opposite direction. For a single-issue website to be anywhere even in the same ballpark as a two-centuries-old broadsheet news brand with scores of full-time writers and production staff and a daily newsstand presence is a remarkable thing indeed.

We might start doing classifieds and sport just to see what happens.

Just a brief update on some legal shenanigans. Having received no response to TWO lawyers’ letters, I’ve filed a court claim against Express Newspapers over false and defamatory claims made in an article by Siobhan McFadyen (sourced by JK Rowling) on the Sunday Express website of 30 October, as detailed in this Wings article.

The court fee was partly funded by popular politics pundit John McTernan.

Read the rest of this entry →

I wasn’t going to mention this on the site because it’s basically a personal matter, but as most readers don’t use Twitter or Facebook it probably ought to be briefly filed for the record, given the amount of media coverage there’s been.

It won’t take long.

Read the rest of this entry →

Half a decade ago today, on 7 November 2011, Wings Over Scotland was born.

And since we don’t generally do stat posts any more (the last proper one was a year ago), we hope you’ll forgive us a small indulgence to mark the milestone with a light sprinkling of facts and figures.

Read the rest of this entry →